Just a thought...

What ails health care delivery in India? Part 1- The infrastructure

2009-12-26T16:38:00.000-08:00

Aaditya has shot off another angry email to the health minister…knowing fully well that just like the last time, this one would most likely be ignored too. Both times he actually put in an enormous amount of research, expertise and perspective - formulating clear plans and suggesting ways and means to remedy the particular problems he’s been perturbed about. These weren’t a means to rant at the establishment. I suspect the powers that be lost no time in brushing his emails off to the trash bin in one clean sweep without so much as a curious glance. At least that seems the most likely scenario as he has never heard back.
It’s true that the Indian healthcare system inspires dread and frustration in a by and large susceptible population struggling with every bend and curve of the system, unable to find any alternative. Some of the obscene statistics that have now become the hallmark of Indian healthcare system around the globe include the 900,000 Indians that die every year from drinking contaminated water and the more gruesome “5.6 million child deaths” in India every year, making up more than half of the world’s total. In the age of ‘India shining’ and words such as ‘corporate superpower’ being bandied about, this almost seems like an anachronism, doesn’t it? I won’t harp on about more of these ‘numbers’ as generations have sat on these statistics with nothing changing except the hospital walls which now look more beige than red, with successive generations of patients, their relatives and ward boys having spat that ubiquitous ‘paan ki peek’ that is as much a part of the hospital as the flies that buzz above.

As with everything else, Indians of a few thousand years ago seem to have been a lot more proficient and systematic at managing health care problems as well. We all cram lessons in school about Charaka, the ancient physician and Sushruta, the ancient surgeon who were both pioneers in their respective fields. Even before their time, there is some evidence that Agnivesh wrote an encyclopedic treatise under the guidance of the ancient physician Atreya in the eighth century BC. There is some evidence that Emperor Ashoka Maurya (third century BC) was the first leader in world history to attempt to give health care to all of his citizens. Thus it was the India of antiquity which was the first state to give its citizens national health care.

What seems to have gone wrong? The modern Indian system of health care is loosely based on the tiered British system, the National Health Service or NHS. We have Primary health care centres at village/small town levels and district hospitals/referral centres at the district or city level to manage the greater numbers in the city and more complicated problems referred from the PHC’s. But here the similarity ends. The PHC’s, though ideally suited to the needs of a country like India, are hardly functional. In actual effect, the system works with major input from the private sector through corporate hospitals and what are called ‘polyclinics’ where money making takes precedence over all else. The ‘sarkari haspatal’ experience is nothing short of purgatory for most of its users.

The system as it works in the UK (and yes, they have had their own share of problems with a fully state funded system of health care recently) caters to ALL citizens irrespective of their paying capacity. From the most basic level of preventative care to highest level of surgical /interventional care, everything is offered free of cost. This is what the planners in India envisaged. Except that they forgot to make provision for the basic needs of such a system. In India, health care comes under the remit of state Governments with central government providing overall direction and recognizing areas of impetus through the five year plans. The Seventh Five-Year Plan (FY 1985-89) budgeted Rs 33.9 billion for health, an amount roughly double the outlay of the sixth plan. However, the catch is that health spending as a portion of total plan outlays, had declined over the years since the first plan in 1951, from a high of 3.3% of the total plan spending in FY 1951-55 to 1.9% of the total for the seventh plan.

But financial resourcing is only part of the problem. Health care professionals – their attitudes, ethics and respect for self and profession seem to be the major players in what ails this system. In 2005 the World Bank conducted a study and reported that "a detailed survey of the knowledge of medical practitioners for treating five common conditions in Delhi found that the average doctor in a public primary health center has around a 50-50 chance of recommending a harmful treatment". This is the more shameful aspect of how a country of over one billion and a so called emerging economic superpower manages the health of the nation. Note the setting here- the public primary health center. Something about that rankles. It’s as if the country’s polity has decided that the poor/lower middle class Indian can make do with second grade health care. How else do you explain the fetid, non-resourced environs of a primary health care center? A rickety chair and desk, plaster falling off walls, no medical equipment to speak of and no support system in place should a difficulty arise. So by logical extension, the only people you find populating these centres are ones who would rather be elsewhere but find themselves unable to.

The disparity between how core services such as health and education are delivered by the public sector and how things work in the economic/commercial hubs of the nation couldn’t be any wider. There has been a complete failure to integrate health with wider social and economic development. While money flows in certain sectors, health and education end up being the ‘poorer cousin.’ The attitude at the top is that of indifference and apathy. Obviously, people have been dying of poor health for decades and no political party has ever lost an election on this issue. So why bother? And here is where the story of downfall begins for a medical professional. A healthy and motivated workforce only exists where adequate support is available at the top. As with people in the financial sector, give these people proper working conditions, make resources available to them and they would work. At least a majority would.

The lowest rung of health care in the UK starts with the GP’s or General Practitioners, who also happen to be some of the best paid health professionals. They have a planned system of referral to the secondary level and a thoroughly self sufficient setup to cater to all health problems that can be managed at primary level. They work with immense pride in what they do and society recognizes them as the key player in improving community health. There is never any question of their being treated as inferior to a doctor in a tertiary hospital. The GP’s have support from well trained nursing and paramedical staff and work with a team rather than in isolation. They have an electronic medical records system and access to national guidelines and protocols for management of the plethora of non-serious conditions that they manage in the community. Above all, they are trained from an early stage to be ‘family physicians’ and are not therefore people who could not be specialists settling in for the compromise of general practice.

And that is precisely what we lack. An adequately paid ‘primary’ workforce that has access to at least basic infrastructure. No one is asking for an interventional radiologist at every PHC but basic medicines, syringes, gloves, antiseptics, wound dressing, local anesthetic in adequate quantities is elementary. Nobody can ever know all about all aspects of medicine and its futile to expect this from our overworked and underpaid band of community medics. In a country like India where roughly 700 million people have no access to specialist care, it is astonishing that there is no recognized training programme in community medicine! So what the world bank report failed to highlight perhaps was that these people who they found lacking in knowledge, were functioning not only without guidelines/protocols, knowledge resources and infrastructure to upgrade their learning but also without any semblance of training for the job they were expected to do. They carry out a job that no one else seems to want to do and morale, motivation, job satisfaction and pride in what they do is nonexistent. They need to be appreciated and recognized, not treated like second rate citizens in the medical fraternity.

Just about a quarter of a million trained doctors come out annually in our country and yet there is a perpetual shortage of medical staff in rural areas. The Government tried a policy of enforcing rural postings but why not invest in rural healthcare instead? If these doctors had a viable career option in the form of rural practice, why would they struggle in the cut throat competition in surplus areas?

While no one would dispute the fact that India has its own set of unique problems and no foreign model can be superimposed on it, the obvious lack of interest in improving grass root level healthcare is a disgrace. While we brag about an ever expanding ‘medical tourism’ industry and healthcare is set to become a $150 billion industry by 2017, this seems like a hollow victory in the absence of any sign of improvement in the health of those that need it most. It’s a slap in the faces of policymakers that less than 40% births in the country are attended by trained birth attendants and maternal mortality still sits at the same level as 60yrs ago. To get a sense of just how far behind we are from the rest of the world , maternal mortality rate i.e. a mother dying in childbirth, which is arguably the most sensitive index of the health of a nation, was still sitting at about 450/100,000 live births compared to about 14/100,000 in the UK. That is a staggering difference. What’s more poignant is that about 800,000 women each year die of the most easily preventable causes possible- anemia, infection and haemorrhage. If Mumtaz Mahal died of haemorrhage after childbirth in the 1600’s, more than three hundred years later, one of our most prominent and promising actresses of recent times, Smita Patil, dies of the same in 1986, telling us that nothing had changed in the interim. It requires the simplest measures to prevent so many unnecessary deaths each year- deaths that leave fragmented families and the spectre of infants without their mothers. We’re perpetually in a race to be as advanced as the developed countries of the west. Why then has no initiative been shown to be at par with these countries in terms of the most basic human necessity- efficient healthcare? The answer lies perhaps in freeing healthcare from corrupt political influence and putting people who really know, in charge of the system. Maybe then we’d be able to make a start towards becoming a healthy nation, which I presume comes before ‘superpower’ nation.

The other side of the story

2009-12-11T08:32:00.000-08:00

Rohit’s uncle who lives in Bhopal has two very bright, chirpy, extremely lovable kids, 9 and 14 each. Of late we’ve noticed that they have acquired the look of mini sumo wrestlers, which to me isn’t a particularly good look if you can help it. So Rohit mentioned this to his Uncle one day. And got an incredulous look that translated in to ‘you’re either bonkers or under the influence of a cocktail of unmentionables.’ Followed by a retort “arrey khaate peete ghar ke hain to pata bhi to chalna chahiye.”

I live in a country (Scotland) which is second only to the US in terms of the number of Obese. The Americans have been the most obese in the world now for some years. It has been estimated that one out of every four Americans is now frankly obese as opposed to just being overweight – defined as having a body mass index of more than 30. (Body mass index is calculated as the body weight in kilograms divided by the height squared. So, it’s a true measure of how much weight there is in relation to height, in other words, body surface area. So, a shorter person will hit the high BMI mark of 30 with a lot less weight than a taller person.) Looks like the trend is catching up in India faster than anyone imagined.

One of the scariest adverts for me of recent times has been this:
“McDonald's India: As Indian as you and me……..”

This euphemistically worded ad conceals in it, a very deep intent to penetrate the Indian market and inundate it with what has been the undoing of health aspirations of a generation of Americans and more recently Brits. And looks like our folk have lapped it up like there’s no tomorrow. It used to be said that things that were happening in America reached India maybe with an 8-10 year lag. Now of course this gap is a lot shorter and in the case of practices with a serious potential for self harm, this seems to be instant. So upper class Indians have rushed into the race to be ‘fat and merry’. Even more alarming is the trend in children. In the UK, around 27 per cent of children are now overweight and research suggests the main problem is a continual reduction in the amount of exercise children take. Many overweight children have overweight parents - it's often a matter of family lifestyles. Obesity in the UK is now normal in society and someone with a bodyweight within the recommended range, stands out. How much longer before we start to boast of similar statistics? In adults, obesity causes increased risk of cardiovascular events, diabetes, arthritis and so on. The same risks are now beginning to emerge in children. Obesity increases the risk of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes which is normally a disease seen in later life in adults. However, increasingly children in their teens are presenting with type 2 diabetes as a consequence of being obese. Young girls run the risk of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) with long term sequelae of cardiac disease, diabetes and even cancer of the womb. Obesity in fact has moved on from being a ‘pre-disposing’ factor to certain health conditions to actually being part of a spectrum of diseases.

Indians when they emigrate to other countries, take their genetic risk, something called syndrome X which is commoner in South Asian populations, with them. They then adapt to the lifestyles and food habits in these countries and are consequently at even greater risk than the indigenous population. In the UK, an organisation called South Asian Health Foundation (SAHF) is working towards spreading awareness of these issues.

It’s a question of changing the outlook to health. Being a little chubby should no longer be seen as a matter of pride or a mark of affluence. On the other hand I am not for one instant suggesting that we should all join the size zero cult. That has problems of its own. In the UK, obsession with size zero has long been the bane of life for every impressionable teenage girl. Of late, there has been a counter offensive of sorts with a new pageant for plus size women. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEOuqjpQ5g8)

While it may just be a backlash against an unholy trend for unnaturally thin women’s bodies, the implications of this sort of ‘glorification’ of what’s essentially a health problem, are grave. It sends the wrong signal to women struggling with their body image. It seems teenage girls are no longer at risk of falling a victim to the epidemic of anorexia –but of obesity. It promotes a culture of overeating and not exercising as these are now considered ‘okay.’ Try telling these girls that in ten years time they would be in and out of hospitals with diabetes or angina and that might be a more realistic picture, albeit one that is bound to raise the hackles of a number of these proponents of ‘curvy’ figures. This is just political correctness gone crazy. In fact it got so bad at one point that a colleague was cautioned by the management when a patient complained about being ‘made to feel guilty’. The doctor in question, who is an obstetrician, had given the woman a fact sheet about the precise number of complications that increase in an obese woman in pregnancy…all substantiated by well validated studies. It is a crime if you so much as hint about losing weight, in order to minimise so many health complications. Of late, the trick I use is to pass on the counselling bit to my nurse who at a ‘plump’ 83 kgs, is seen by a lot of people as ‘one of them’ and is therefore not as unacceptable as me.

While I completely accept that someone who as a result of a medical condition cannot lose weight (women with PCOS, for example need a lot of extra support to shed those extra pounds) should not be blamed for the resulting health conditions, I can absolutely not believe that 30-40 percent of a nations population is destined to be obese and unhealthy and can do nothing about it. People need to take more responsibility for their own health. And this does not necessarily mean having a blame culture in healthcare, which is what many suppose this is all about

Bolly Saga: The Case Of The Missing Brain

2009-12-09T13:22:00.000-08:00

As I sat watching the very somber moments in the movie Paa, I could hear a couple of sobs around me in the theatre. The atmosphere was generally muted, fraught with sympathy with the protagonist in the movie (namely AB). And then, out of the blue, a chuckle escaped me…attracting a few angry glances. I said a sheepish ‘sorry’ and sank into my seat.

Right then! Granted there has been a massive improvement in the quality of movies doled out by bollywood in the last few years. But one thing that has remained consistent is the misplaced ideology surrounding how medical problems should be depicted. Giving rise to several very humorous moments. The precise scene in Paa that caused me to lose the emotional flow of the movie is when Auro is in a hospital and suddenly becomes quite agitated. The doctor rushes in, puts a stethoscope to his chest and exclaims- he’s had a stroke! As to how he reached that conclusion is completely beyond me….no one else has ever been able to do it, even after spending a lifetime in stroke research!

On the way back, another scene came to mind, from the recent release, Kurbaan. Now, I did enjoy the movie and in many ways, the subject treatment was above average. But remember the bit where Saif comes back after being hit by a bullet in a major police encounter? So, here’s the diminutive Ms Kapoor, at his side with a first aid box, hands trembling. Which is all very well. But then, she has a go…. and….hold your breath…gouges the bullet out with eyebrow tweezers! Which of course was very considerately, floating just beneath the skin. She then stitches the impeccable wound with hand held suture (which I presume must be part of every first aid kit in the US just for such an event). And post surgery, everything is instantly well..and the macho Khan goes back to doing his fight sequences..come on guys! I don’t expect you to put in hours researching trauma management, but at least something believable would be good. You don’t have to be remotely connected to medicine to appreciate that you’re being taken for a ride here…a little bit of common sense will do.

Anyway, I’m sure nothing in these movies will ever compare to our classic gems of yesteryears. One scene that instantly comes to mind, and I’m sure every bollywood fanatic will remember this, is from that mother of all blockbusters, Amar Akbar Anthony. Fabulous movie, bollywood drama at its epitome, immensely enjoyable. But then Nirupa Roy gets hit by a car, lands in a hospital where the gorgeous Nitu Singh is sitting at a desk pondering over cosmic events, while her bleeding patient lies in a bed next doors. The even more gorgeous (I always thought that, looking at this pair) Rishi Kapoor comes in for a casual chat, and she says ‘arrey, tumhara blood bhi to wo negative wala hai na?’ and straps him to a charpoy with a needle stuck to his arm. And then the wonder of all wonders happens……three people simultaneously strapped to giving sets, a common line leading to a bottle, and the collective blood being transfused into a, growing pinker every minute, NR. Of course, the other two people happen to be the other two lost sons…hilarious stuff. I can picture some poor hematologist throwing a major convulsion watching this….But then bollywood wouldn’t be the same without some melodrama, tears, lost and found and major medical mishaps.

We’ve seen countless number of movies with identical twins, making you wonder if some extra-terrestrial intervention had caused the rate of identical twinning to suddenly jump up in India by a thousand percent? And then there are scores of movies with the sequence – hit his head, got amnesia, hit it again, got his memory back….Lovely! Or what about the ones where the old woman would lose her eyesight at some point in the movie, and in the climax squeal with delight – ‘beta, mujhe sab kuchh nazar aa raha hai…’ super lovely!

But, do you know which is the unanimous winner, and by a wide margin too? Its got to be Clerk….now I’d forgive you all for a collective case of amnesia on this….it happens to be the most eminently forgettable movie of the last few decades…but a real gem if you consider the entertainment value.

And you’ve got to watch this clip I found on youtube (where else!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HrNLkZx7Gg

Pitaji having a heart attack, greedy doctor refuses to come. So what do we do? Play patriotic songs of course. And lo and behold, Pitaji starts to stomp around throwing his arms around for special effect. Priceless! It defies not only medical science but common sense, sanity and all those tiny slivers of art and aesthetics that may have escaped unharmed in the rest of the movie.

All said and done, I remain a devout fan of bollywood. There is something quite endearing, even in the most naively shot sequences, something that appeals to the heart, provides an outlet for emotional outburst, lets us all cry and laugh at the same time and brings a touch of hilarity in otherwise glum surroundings. Long live bollywood.

(BTW, you are all welcome to add your own favourite to the list.)

Saving the 'Feriwala'

2009-12-08T14:28:00.000-08:00

The last trip to India left me slightly troubled and until recently I had no idea what it was that was bothering me. Until that discussion at Manisha and Taral’s place which somehow meandered into the reasons for going back home. “As it is, you find all the high end shops there nowadays and huge shopping malls too…there is no brand that you won’t find in India now”. Manisha was speaking, as usual, at the top of her voice. And then it struck me….India had started looking too much like the west. The same things that you tire of here- shopping malls, restaurants, multiplexes all looking the same, showing off the same merchandise in every city/town, row after row of the same names…..topshop, newlook, warehouse, oasis and so on. In fact if you were to transplant the high street from one city into another, I doubt people will even notice.

My memories of shopping back home invariably drift to the little shops selling everything from cosmetics to jewellery, the tiny shops with shelf after shelf of garments and dress material which offered free alteration services – yeah, try asking for the price of alteration in one of the UK shops, it might just turn out to be more than what you’ve paid for the dress…but that’s beside the point.

As a kid, I’ve seen my mum buy fresh vegetables from the ‘thele wala’ who’d come to the door and implore ‘lauki, kaddoo, tamatar le lo….’ until either my mum or the kam wali bai opened the door and told him off for being too loud. But this would always result in some purchase being made, even if just a stack of coriander or a bunch of chillies. Organic vegetables, delivered to your doorstep, without the hefty premium on being ‘organic’…

Then again there were these numerous ‘feri wala’ guys who brought merchandise from far and wide- Kashmiri shawls, Saris from Orissa, jewellery from Rajasthan and went from one doorstep to another. A different world altogether. And the social side of all this is rarely appreciated….my mum would call on her friends who’d all come over for an afternoon of chit chat, purchasing and cups of tea. In my heavily blockaded and compartmentalised world, these memories seem to belong in some distant past. And one of the reasons is that our society, in a bid to copy everything western, has turned its back to these quaint little rituals and these people who now themselves seem to be an anachronism .

In the last few years we’ve seen corporate giants like Tesco and Marks and Spencer make a bid for the Indian market which of course is quite a lucrative thing to do, given the size of the Indian consumer-force. The sad bit though is that these peculiar, curious shops each selling something different and original will all be replaced by giant stores all selling factory produced goods that we are so sick of seeing everywhere. Jai Ho!

'Going Rogue'

2009-11-24T15:57:00.000-08:00

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely……….these words ring true of not only the entire socio political setup of this world that we live in but also of things on a much smaller stage…everyday living and issues surrounding who rules who?

It would be an interesting experiment to give power in the hands of the downtrodden of today….the ones who curse the system and wish politicians dead. Would they then establish a just world order or fall prey to the very temptations and machinations they abhor today??

Would this then answer the quintessential question? Chicken or egg? What came first?
Is it the wrong kind of people who go into politics, accumulate wealth and become powerful and then perpetrate the hideous culture that has become the hallmark of politics across the globe?
Or is it normal people …people like you and me, but maybe with a dash more of ambition thrown in, who get into politics, wake up to the immense thrill and kick that power gives and then start on the journey of corruption to maintain that power ?

Two old political scandals, or shall I say mishaps, have returned to the fore in the public arena this week. They belong in two different continents but the undertones are similar….
As the Chilcot enquiry begins its work to look into the legality of the war in Iraq, the most palpable sentiment around is hatred for Blair. Yet this is a man who could do no wrong a few years ago. A darling of the masses, twice elected to power, with a huge halo round his head and the glow of his charismatic personality radiating far and wide.

Did Tony Blair start off as a well meaning Prime Minister who seriously wanted to do the right thing, defend democracy around the world and establish a just world order? Few believe this today but in the heydays of Labour supremacy in Britain, he did have people enthralled by his sharp oratory and the look of earnestness about him. Did he start off as a smarmy, sly man or was it years in politics that made him cynical to the extent that many now are ready to believe he took the country into an illegal war? How cynical do you have to be to do something you know will cause immeasurable death and destruction, reduce an entire nation to a rubble and ruin the lives of generations to come?

Opponents of the war hope the inquiry will establish that the decision to invade Iraq was illegal and based on flawed or deliberately misleading intelligence about the risks posed by Saddam Hussein. Whatever else the enquiry achieves, simply by being in the news the past few months, it has played a major role in Blair losing out in the race to be EU President.

The other case in point is our very own L K Advani. In a dramatic turn of events, -the Liberhan commission report, which was 17 years in the making, was tabled after details of its conclusions – apparently implicating top leaders of the Hindu nationalist opposition in the Babri masjid destruction – were leaked on monday, triggering uproar in the lower house. Personally, I have always found it extremely difficult to digest that Advani and co had at any point acted out of ‘Ram bhakti’. It never was a campaign of moral outrage against historical acts of vandalism or a campaign to reignite religious sentiments in the hearts of the non believers. It always was a cynical political act directed towards exploiting the extreme naivety of the electorate, wasn’t it? Yet at the time, even the intelligentsia was divided about whether to celebrate or lament their growing influence.

Who knows if these two men started out believing in a just cause and simply ‘went rogue’. (Ha ha….could not keep our darling Ms Palin put of this…). Time will tell.

The (Sur)real world of Indian television.

2009-11-18T04:50:00.000-08:00

Have any of you recently tried to watch the soap operas telecast on Indian television channels ? If so, you will probably have complete empathy and sympathy with me and understand why I’m still tortured by the memories of what happened.

Here’s what happened: We’d driven off to London for the weekend (on one of our-‘let’s just drive off somewhere’whims). I have to say the weekend went by very well – we managed to catch ‘We will rock you- the musical’ and had some fabtastic Indian food which is always the attraction on a trip to London (God bless the Gujjus).

Then on the way back, we decided to stop by at one of Rohit’s old friends, Neha. Now it so happens that Neha is not just a devout fan of Indian TV soaps but in fact eats, talks and breathes television.

So she told us of this exciting new reality(?) show which has a bunch of guys staying together (No, don’t let your imagination run wild- that just does not happen on Indian television, yet!), a bunch of girls staying next doors with their mothers (the guys’ mothers, silly) and they are supposed to assess each others’ compatibility- the guys and girls with each other and the girls with their prospective mothers in law.

Needless to say there was a lot of bitching, sobbing, outrageous statements a la Big Brother (or is it Big Boss?) and generally everyone seemed to be terribly stressed about coming out of the TV show, having made a lifelong commitment or found their soul mates. Watching it, we went through a complete whirlwind of emotions in rapid succession - disbelief, amusement, puzzlement, frustration, and then downright rage… Rage at the way producers of these shows take the Indian audience to be made up of part cretins and part masochists. There is this complete dumbing down of TV shows and the audiences don’t know to expect any better.

What’s particularly frustrating is the portrayal of female characters: if she’s not running a corporate powerhouse in a sexy mini, she must be a stay at home bahu, indulging in politics of the most complex nature (Move over Mayavati and Rabri, the Indian Bahu is soon going to overtake you), all the time bedecked in tons of jewellery with, of course, a pallu over her head. She wakes up in the morning with more jewellery than most of us manage to wear in a lifetime.

We thought we’d had enough when she insisted there was this other reality show (!!!!) featuring the newly engaged Rakhi Sawant and her partner showing their parenting skills….with other people’s children! Seems the idea is to have celebrity couples staying in a swanky Goa resort with successively older children every week, starting with toddlers. To judge what? How these smooth actors and actresses cope with the stress of being around other peoples’ kids for a few weeks?

I would not even like to venture into what the repercussions could be of one of these ‘celebrity’ parents abusing their proximity with other peoples’ children (Yes, despite 24 hr camera surveillance). What kind of parent leaves his/her child with some fake TV parent to have a showdown on national television?

Tell you what, one good thing to come out of the ordeal was that it reaffirmed our views that we do not need television for entertainment. Looks like the news is all I can watch anyway…as long as its not Star News reporters screaming down my throat, that is!

(P.S.- Interestingly my spell check suggested changing Mayavati to Amravati (didn’t know that was part of MS word repertoire) and Rabri to Rabbi (If only!)

Nick Griffin on BBC question time

2009-11-06T06:52:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlQFvKgPSC0

Didnt watch the actual program but saw the video clips a couple of days later. (available on youtube, above).
Somehow, just came out with this acute sense of anticlimax. I had rather imagined Nick Griffin to at least be....mmm...you know, well read, erudite in his specialised field(!) and a good orator. Whereas he just came across as wishy washy, evasive and in places I simply felt aghast at his assumption that he could come to a national platform, expecting people to believe in his statements simply by sharing patronising smiles and nodding his head. I couldnt decide whether he is supremely stupid or attempting to be supremely smart. In any case, anyone who may have harboured delusions of sympathy for any one of his poilicies, I'm sure switched off his/her television thoroughly disillusioned. So in that sense, we all ought to congratulate the BBC for airing this. All the half baked truths about his party's policy that seemed attractive to some people (they nust have been, for his party to have won seats in an election) were unsheathed for what they were. A truly illuminating episode.

Of the panel, looks like Sayeeda Warsi was well coached in the art of political one-upmanship. She managed to get Jack Straw on a back foot and generally managed to win approval of the audience. So if this was political hara kiri for Mr Griffin, it would probably be a highlight on Baroness Warsi's political portfolio.

'Bharat ek khoj'

2009-11-05T10:58:00.000-08:00

Granted I was a kid when this was aired. And this was in the good ol' days of Doordarshan when you didnt know the mad urge to flip between 21 channels in as many seconds. So I still remember some of the old TV serials from that time. Nowadays, aside from news items, I watch zero television.

Anyway this particular title 'song' (its wrong to call it song as it is translation from shlokas of the Rigveda) stuck in my memory and was it a pleasant surprise to see that some helpful soul had actually uploaded it to wikipedia! There honestly is not much that is not on wikipedia at the moment.

Another favourite is the theme song from 'Chanakya'. If anyone has the words, please feel free to upload to wiki! (And do let me know)

From wikipedia

This first stanza is in Sanskrit (Rig Veda, Book 10, Hymn 129):

nāsadāsīn no sadāsīt tadānīṃ nāsīd rajo no vyomāparo yat
kimāvarīvaḥ kuha kasya śarmannambhaḥ kimāsīd ghahanaṃ ghabhīram

Srishti se pehle sat nahin thaa, asat bhi nahin

Antariksh bhi nahin, aakaash bhee nahin thaa.

Chhipaa thaa kyaa, kahaan, kisne dhaka thaa?

Us pal to agam, atal jal bhi kahaan thaa.

Shrishti kaa kaun hain kartaa?

Kartaa hain yeh vaa akartaa?

Oonche aakash mein rahtaa.

Sadaaa adhyaksh banaa rahtaa.

Wohee sach much mein jaantaa..Yaa nahin bhi jaanataa

Hain kisi ko nahin pataa,

Nahin pataa,

Nahin hai pataa, nahin hai pataa.

Voh tha hiranya garbh srishti se pehle vidyamaan.

Vohi to saare bhoot jaatee ka swami mahaan.

jo hai astitvamaana dharti aasmaan dhaaran kar.

Aise kis devta ki upasana kare hum havi dekar?

Jis ke bal par tejomay hai ambar.

Prithvi hari bhari sthapit sthir.

Swarg aur sooraj bhi sthir.

Aise kis devta ki upasana kare hum havi dekar?

Garbh mein apne agni dhaaran kar paida kar,

Vyapa tha jal idhar udhar neeche upar,

Jagaa chuke vo ka ekameva pran bankar,

Aise kis devta ki upasana kare hum havi dekar?

Om ! Srishti nirmata swarg rachaiyta purvaj rakhsa kar.

Satya dharma palak atul jal niyamak raksha kar.

Phaili hain dishayen bahu jaisi uski sab mein sab par,

Aise hi devta ki upasana kare hum havi dekar,

Aise hi devta ki upasana kare hum havi dekar.

So, what label is it that you are wearing?

2009-10-22T01:29:00.000-07:00

Dave scrutinized Rohit’s sunglasses for the tenth time and looked as puzzled as ever..where the heck is the label on this?? was his question at last….

Poor Dave has forever been perplexed by the severe ‘lack of labels’ in our life. Why don’t we buy D&G or Esprit. Why no brands around?

Its kind of poignant too, his complete lack of understanding of why we don’t buy designer stuff despite being able to afford it. (Yeah, if we squandered our entire salaries on it, that is). Come on guys, surely if its in the shops, its meant to be bought? is his constant query. The happiest I have seen him was when he found the Armani shirt he did not need reduced from £850 to £810 and of course rushed forward to buy it.

Its not as if I don’t like shopping.. I’m a seasoned ‘sales’ veteran. I do dabble in a bit of retail therapy now and again. But I like it to be on my own terms.

Maybe its my Indian upbringing. I mean I grew up with my mother and all the ‘aunties’ of the campus constantly comparing notes on how much each had managed to get an item reduced before buying it. Used to be a matter of great pride if you bought the side table at half price or got the best deal on a jar of coffee.

I love haggling too! Pity I cant do that anymore in the UK but I’m unashamedly a fan of this dying art. Still would do it in the ‘galiyaras’ of chandni chowk or Palika Bazaar every time I return home. “Arre…. bechna hai to sahi daam batao.” Where’s the fun in shopping without this?

Dave would be shocked and horrified if I gave him details of our shopping habits.

Personally I think he’s completely wasted, being this upper middle class Brit who has never been to anything other than these mutely pretentious (the more dimly lit the shop, the more expensive it is) shops selling absurdly overpriced stuff….a cotton T-shirt for example with nothing else but a big screaming logo in the front for £210?

I like to think I’m an empowered shopper. (anyone remember surf’s ‘Lalitaji’?) I mean, if you are driven to buying everything that the big retail bosses want you to buy, where does your intelligence or individuality come in to it?

I have had to laugh at the price labels in some of these shops. And at people who’d still buy them simply because they have a particular logo or name printed on them. Designer clothes are like those penis extension cars people buy to announce to the world just in what bracket their earnings lie. They may not look good in them or even feel comfortable wearing them, but as long as there is a name on it….. These happen to be human beings with an inherent lack of confidence in their own persona or presence…..those who look around every time they contemplate anything other than breathing and see what others are doing. What’s ‘hot’ just now, or what’s ‘cool’, depending on which of these phrases is currently more ‘hip’. Ha.

Ive always looked at Victoria Beckam, for example, and wondered if she ever manages to shake out this feeling that the whole world is watching her and is able to step out of her designerwear for long enough to actually enjoy living. The poor dame looks perpetually haggard and distressed. Even for someone who’s made a career out out of wearing D&G couture and not to forget, their mega size sunglasses whether indoors or outdoors, it seems a bit excessive.

Anyway, point of the matter is, I would rather buy a fantastically tailored coat from that little known high street shop than absurd looking designer stuff that I’d be afraid to wear to a party in case I spilled my drink on it.

Exactly what constitutes racism?

2009-10-11T12:59:00.000-07:00

Such a potentially explosive topic.. do you find yourself a victim of racism at times? What is racism? Not being considered a part of the group?

To be honest, whatever the dictionary definition, most of the times when laymen like us refer to an individual or a set up as being racist, we are merely commenting on the unfriendly nature of the place or individual. I am by no means denying the existence of serious racists in our society. That would at best be naïve and at worst dangerous.
But I get the feeling that we use this word all too commonly without thinking of the weight attached to it.

As for myself, the most vivid memory of feeling truly outcast because of who I was or where I came from, is sadly not of working in the UK but in Bombay when we moved, right after finishing medical college, to work in Bombay hospital. The fact that I could not speak Marathi always came to the fore (Rohit is a lot more accomplished in these matters and was speaking workable Marathi within days).

I’m sure there is a lot of covert ‘racism’ in our own country towards those that are different to you. Its not racism as per strict dictionary meaning, but its probably the more widespread of the two.

I for example, hear frequently about how the NHS is institutionally racist. About how, any foreign doctor has to be twice as good as a local graduate to measure up. About how the locals have a far better rapport in the unit despite maybe not being as knowledgeable or hard working. But is this not more about the inbuilt empathy or rapport that you feel for anyone from the same background or upbringing as yourself? And conversely, about the innate tendency to maintain a distance from or be suspicious towards anyone different to you. It is, I suppose, a natural instinct. I for one, have now come to terms with the unmitigated hostility doled out to me in, what is simply another state in my country. I now recognize it more as a case of xenophobia. A reaction simply to someone you don’t know or recognize as being different. It’s the ‘outsider’ syndrome, rather than racism. However there is a very fine line between the two and hostility towards outsiders can easily progress to overtly racist behaviour. We all remember the truly horrific episode in Mumbai not so long ago, of course.

Wake up, indeed..

2009-10-11T12:09:00.000-07:00

Went to watch this movie- 'wake up Sid' and I thought it was a cute movie, well made. But this is not a critique of the movie. The predominant thought as I drove home was not how charming or good looking Rishi Kapoor's son is (Yes, I'm a fan of Kapoor senior)...I pondered instead on the simple message of the movie, that you need to let the mind be free, in order for an individual to achieve anything. I cant remember how often I've felt that as students in the current system of education we were merely being driven like sheep towards a common exit- to come out as factory productions of the ideal graduate. But there cannot be a common exit...each individual is different. The current system only succeeds in stifling the natural talents and inborn instincts of some of the most incredibly gifted students.

Macaulay brand education, which was meant to produce an effecient bureaucratic class for the Raj anyway (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1833macaulay-india.html) is today simply an instrument of the state. There is very little, if any, room for spotaneity or originality. We must all be clones.

No doubt the educational system in the country needs a fresh perspective and a complete overhaul. But this looks like a very distant dream, especially because the powers that be are engaged in a constant battle about which poltical party is able to influence the curriculum the most and twist and turn facts to reflect their ideology.

The educated elite of the country have no doubt lost faith in the entire setup. How else do you explain the intense enthusiasm that surrounds any politician who has studied abroad? As if by the mere act of having studied at Harvard or Cambridge, they have gained extra insight into the business of running this country, or would be more dependable or honest than your other run of the mill politicians. The level of faith in the Indian educatioanal system is pretty much at its nadir. What we need is someone with a backbone to take charge of the educational system and prove the naysayers wrong.

The extremists among us

2009-04-27T10:27:00.000-07:00

Have you noticed a recent upsurge of the fanatical streak in men and women you formerly thought were like minded individuals…you know, educated professionals, the guy you share a smile with at the office coffee machine, the gal you go to gym with….suddenly, discussions have become acrid, personal. People launch more readily into the separatist tirade you’ve so far associated with the likes of shiv sena activists/bajrang dal goons……
What’s caused the sudden paradigm shift?

I’ve always believed in the world being made up of two kinds of people…the good and the bad. There’s good and bad people in every religion, caste, creed, race. Maybe that’s very simplistic for our times…..but whats wrong with simplicity? Why complicate a society already heaving under the pressures of combining modern day living with the realities of our past?

I recently got a forwarded email from a guy I used to know in college, in support of Hindus trying to ‘uphold Hindutva’ as it were….on why its essential for Hindus to come up in arms against anyone trying to convert them to other religions and so forth. Well, the simple question here is if this guy would have cared so much if these very Hindus whose souls he’s worrying about, were starving to death. Probably not.

In my book, if you can do nothing to help the Hindu who can’t put food in his children’s mouth, cant afford medicines for his ailing wife then do not tell him what religion to follow.

I have far more common with Rehman, my old college friend than the rowdy upholder of Hindu faith that’s stomping the streets, frothing at the mouth chanting obscenities against another faith. But the dilemma of present times is, its easy to separate yourself from this ruffian….not so easy when your childhood friend, your colleague, family member begins to mouth the same spoon fed monologues…

Its easy to hate….always has been. The growing tentacles of communication media have made it easier to scaremonger…to perpetrate white lies or just colour the grey into a very deep shade of black. Who knows what the reality of the catholics of Orissa was, who got beaten up and slain by people pretending to be of my religion or that of youngsters ‘going overboard’ in aping western culture in the pubs of Bangalore who got humiliated and manhandled by upholders of our ‘ancient traditions and culture.’…but there’s a hundred and fifty different versions doing rounds of the internet and more than ever before people are openly supporting these heinous activities. That’s what’s changed. There have always been ‘gundas’….lawbreakers, in our society but to see supposedly sane individuals speaking their language is scary.

Home revisited

2009-04-27T09:09:00.000-07:00

India shining…..
The driver who came to pick us up at the airport loved to talk. Which always brings this gleam of utter pleasure in my husband’s eyes. He loves to goad and prod people into talking…gives him food for life. Yes, I have told him a few times, medicine doesn’t quite do justice to his talents. Anyway, so the guy was very enthusiastic about India shining- “arre bhaiya, abhi aap dekhna, ye do bade mall ke baad yahan ek aur sabse bada mall banega. Ab to foreign mein jo milta hai wo sab yahan milta hai.”
And so went the chat…Rohit his usual encouraging self- “waah yaar, tumko to bahut pata hai”….

So far so good. Drawing room chat for our entire length of stay centred on water though…or the lack of it. There was an almost palpable air of apprehension of what was to follow. It appears the authorities forgot to forward plan for water supply for the entire five month spell of skin cracking, torrid summer. So, there was to be NO water supply for the coming months, which made the current state of affairs- water once in five days- seem like a life of luxury. Those with oodles of money were obviously worried about the increase in crime this would bring….
Contingency plan?.....if you have money, get a water tanker to your home every few days n fill up all you can. And no prizes for guessing who owned these water tankers..of course it was those very politicians in the water department whose job it was to ensure regular water supply anyway. Now that’s what I call a genius business plan!

So on the way back our driver was slightly subdued. Its easy to get lost in the zitter glitter of fancy multiplexes and designer shops that adorn the high street in every big city nowadays. But the question is, is this what India needs? Or should the turning wheels of economic development be used to drive the fundamental changes this country’s billion strong population has craved for, for decades now i.e. water, electricity, sanitation, good roads?

No doubt we all feel proud of the recent surge in the Indian economy. I'm proud of the way Indian businessmen have taken the lead, the world over in entrepreneurship and intrepid business planning. But if the ultimate aim of all this is to create further luxury for the 0.1% of India's population, then I'm afraid nothing much has changed.

License to conceive?

2009-01-09T11:39:00.000-08:00

Its two am in the morning and she’s come to the hospital with abdominal pain- ‘I cann’y do nothing for this pain, doctor’. Okay, so what have you been doing- ‘I wuz at the pub with ma mates…I”d had a few shots of vodka when this pain started...I’m in agony doctor’. And then she very conveniently stretches out on the couch and the next thing I hear is the sound of her loud snoring. With a growing sense of dejection I open her case records and see a series of admissions, each time after either drug or alcohol overuse. This woman is six months pregnant…and every conceivable drug misuse has been documented in her clinical notes, throughout the pregnancy.
I come home in the morning and have a rant, before an increasingly perplexed looking Rohit. ‘Look at Soumya and Piyush….they cant have children, despite the fact they’d be the most loving and caring parents in the world....and here is this woman, who’s got a brood of, god knows, six or seven already, from some six or seven different partners, all in different care homes or foster homes now, and she continues to breed!’ I blurt out in a single breath.
The sense of ‘acute lopsidedness’ of this world stays with me throughout the day. Soumya n Piyush have been trying for a baby for years. They are now on the waiting list for adoption. But the very long red tape bound around these issues means that they may have to wait for years. There are a dozen different checks to be done. Checks?
Does anyone check to see whether the woman I attended to overnight is fit to be a parent??
This has become my pet hate of late. People who take no responsibility for their lives whatsoever and produce an army of traumatized, scarred little kids who are doomed to a bleak future. And this is the land of ‘equal opportunity’. What kind of opportunities is this child going to get?

Have we reached a point in our society where we should be proposing a ‘license to conceive?’ i.e. you can’t be a parent if you’re deemed unfit to be a parent.
You don’t get to be the third sales assistant at Primark without producing some form of evidence of competence. So why should you be a parent without one?
I’m probably too tired from the night….should get some more sleep and hate the world a little less....

Of Black and White and the various colours in between

2008-12-19T06:48:00.000-08:00

I tried recently to watch the latest Subhash Ghai movie, Yuvraj. I say tried because I gave up in sheer disgust after about 43 mins of it. The movie has no storyline, crappy editing, overacting by almost everyone, and makes you lose faith in the endurance and tenaciousness of masala bollywood fare.
So I was pleasantly surprised to come across this other Subhash Ghai film that came out a little while ago without much noise. This movie is about the coming together of two characters that are so utterly defined by ‘black’ and ‘white’. One is a ‘Fidayeen’ Afghanistan trained terrorist who comes to Delhi to blow up people at the 15th August celebrations at Lal Qila and the other an Urdu professor living in Chandni Chowk who’s full of positive feelings for the entire humanity and who with his wife (played by Shefali Chhaya nee Shah, who I adore anyway) soon adopts this lonely young man and is ferrying him round Delhi’s Gali Mohalla on his Bajaj Super.
And although there are eminent opportunities for the kind of melodrama that Mr Ghai relishes, to his credit, he dodges temptation like never before. The scene where Anil Kapoor, after the pointless killing of his wife, decides not to make the news public fearing Hindu-Muslim tensions, was definitely one where I waited for that over the top, cheesy patriotic rhetoric, but none came. Instead the scene is subtle and underplayed. Well done, Ghai saab for suppressing that usually overpowering urge to pop into a scene yourself and destroy all semblance of serious acting.
The defining moment of the film is when the protagonist, after choosing to not pull the trigger after all, goes after his former mentors and kills them proclaiming- “tumne meri behan ko kyon mara?” The film shows that man made bonds and relationships nurtured through shared dreams can at times overcome prejudices of birth and religion.
Worth a watch if you haven’t already done so.

2008-12-15T14:37:00.000-08:00

I was pained to see the Mumbai terror attack unfold before me on television. Perhaps even more pained was I to see another kind of terror attack unfold shortly afterwards.

I guess the following article did not take me completely by surprise. (http://hindi.webdunia.com/news/news/regional/0812/15/1081215143_1.htm) After being out of news for a while and out of the scene when the nation's pride was to be defended, that group of dastardly lunatics that calls itself shiv sena went into overdrive when opportunity arose to do what they do best - i.e. attacking lone defenceless civilians in their home.

This bunch of hooligans stormed into the home of a lawyer who'd proposed representing Ajmal Ameer Eeman, the lone terrorist arrested after the attack. The lawyer of course had only voiced what's enshrined in the Indian constitution - namely every accused, howsoever heinous the nature of the crime, has the right to be represented in court by a lawyer. The judgement on the culpability or not of an accused can only be taken by a court of law. Trial by public sentiment is perhaps the most unfair and least reliable means of judging a crime.

How long will it take before members of this great community realise that they have the completely wrong mouthpiece for their extrordinary achievements? Messrs Thackray as poster boys for Maratha pride?
And their contribution to the society at large I supppose will honing to perfection the art of making incendiary speeches and pandering to narrow parochial and regional agendas.
What truly upholds the pride of the Marathi community is its rich heritage, its culture, its theatre, its exuberant literature and above all, the extreme tenacity, respect for women and exceptional enterprise that have ensured that Indian citizens everywhere look up to Mumbai as the place where dreams do come true. That image of course is on the brink of being shattered by Raj Thackray's truly moronic acts of vandalising the home and hearth of poor North Indian residents of Mumbai. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Raj_Thackeray_in_judicial_custody_till_Nov_4/articleshow/3621395.cms

Mumbai and Maharashtra shine brightly on the Indian Kaleidoscope but are by no means separate from the heartland. That cohesion and not confrontation make a truly great city was demonstrated amply in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks when people irrespective of their religion, region or place of birth came together, to stand in solidarity with the Mumbaikars.

India's Muslims in Crisis by Aryn Baker

2008-12-14T05:26:00.000-08:00

Extremely thought provoking. Read on............

The disembodied voice was chilling in its rage. A gunman, holed up in the Oberoi Trident hotel in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), where some 40 people had been taken hostage, told an Indian news channel that the attacks were revenge for the persecution of Muslims in India. "We love this as our country, but when our mothers and sisters were being killed, where was everybody?" he asked via telephone. No answer came. But then he probably wasn't expecting one.
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The roots of Muslim rage run deep in India, nourished by a long-held sense of injustice over what many Indian Muslims believe is institutionalized discrimination against the country's largest minority group. The disparities between Muslims, who make up 13.4% of the population, and India's Hindus, who hover at around 80%, are striking. There are exceptions, of course, but generally speaking, Muslim Indians have shorter life spans, worse health, lower literacy levels and lower-paying jobs. Add to that toxic brew the lingering resentment over 2002's anti-Muslim riots in the state of Gujarat. The riots, instigated by Hindu nationalists, killed some 2,000 people, most of them Muslims. To this day, few of the perpetrators have been convicted. (See pictures of the terrorist shootings in Mumbai.)
The huge gap between Muslims and Hindus will continue to haunt India's — and neighboring Pakistan's — progress toward peace and prosperity. But before intercommunal relations can improve, there are even bigger problems that must first be worked out: the schism in subcontinental Islam and the religion's place and role in modern India and Pakistan. It is a crisis 150 years in the making.
The Beginning of the Problem On the afternoon of March 29, 1857, Mangal Pandey, a handsome, mustachioed soldier in the East India Company's native regiment, attacked his British lieutenant. His hanging a week later sparked a subcontinental revolt known to Indians as the first war of independence and to the British as the Sepoy Mutiny. Retribution was swift, and though Pandey was a Hindu, it was the subcontinent's Muslims, whose Mughal King nominally held power in Delhi, who bore the brunt of British rage. The remnants of the Mughal Empire were dismantled, and 500 years of Muslim supremacy on the subcontinent came to a halt.
Muslim society in India collapsed. The British imposed English as the official language. The impact was cataclysmic. Muslims went from near 100% literacy to 20% within a half-century. The country's educated Muslim élite was effectively blocked from administrative jobs in the government. Between 1858 and 1878, only 57 out of 3,100 graduates of Calcutta University — then the center of South Asian education — were Muslims. While discrimination by both Hindus and the British played a role, it was as if the whole of Muslim society had retreated to lick its collective wounds.
Out of this period of introspection, two rival movements emerged to foster an Islamic ascendancy. Revivalist groups blamed the collapse of their empire on a society that had strayed too far from the teachings of the Koran. They promoted a return to a purer form of Islam, modeled on the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Others embraced the modern ways of their new rulers, seeking Muslim advancement through the pursuit of Western sciences, culture and law. From these movements two great Islamic institutions were born: Darul Uloom Deoband in northern India, rivaled only by Al Azhar University in Cairo for its teaching of Islam, and Aligarh Muslim University, a secular institution that promoted Muslim culture, philosophy and languages but left religion to the mosque. These two schools embody the fundamental split that continues to divide Islam in the subcontinent today. "You could say that Deoband and Aligarh are husband and wife, born from the same historical events," says Adil Siddiqui, information coordinator for Deoband. "But they live at daggers drawn."
The campus at Deoband is only a three-hour drive from New Delhi through the modern megasuburb of Noida. Strip malls and monster shopping complexes have consumed many of the mango groves that once framed the road to Deoband, but the contemporary world stops at the gate. The courtyards are packed with bearded young men wearing long, collared shirts and white caps. The air thrums with the voices of hundreds of students reciting the Koran from open-door classrooms.

Founded in 1866, the Deoband school quickly set itself apart from other traditional madrasahs, which were usually based in the home of the village mosque's prayer leader. Deoband's founders, a group of Muslim scholars from New Delhi, instituted a regimented system of classrooms, coursework, texts and exams. Instruction is in Urdu, Persian and Arabic, and the curriculum closely follows the teachings of the 18th century Indian Islamic scholar Mullah Nizamuddin Sehalvi. Graduates go on to study at Cairo's Al Azhar or the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia, or they found their own Deobandi institutions.
Today, more than 9,000 Deobandi madrasahs are scattered throughout India, Afghanistan and Pakistan, most infamously the Dara-ul-Uloom Haqaniya Akora Khattak, near Peshawar, Pakistan, where Mullah Mohammed Omar and several other leaders of Afghanistan's Taliban first tasted a life lived in accordance with Shari'a. Siddiqui visibly stiffens when those names are brought up. They have become synonymous with Islamic radicalism, and Siddiqui is careful to dissociate his institution from those who carry on its traditions, without actually condemning their actions. "Our books are being taught there," he says. "They have the same system and rules. But if someone is following the path of terrorism, it is because of local compulsions and local politics."
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, who founded the Anglo-Mohammedan Oriental College at Aligarh in 1877, studied under the same teachers as the founders of Deoband. But he believed that the downfall of India's Muslims was due to their unwillingness to embrace modern ways. He decoupled religion from education and in his school sought to emulate the culture and training of India's new colonial masters. Islamic culture was part of the curriculum, but so were the latest advances in sciences, medicine and Western philosophy. The medium was English, the better to prepare students for civil-service jobs. He called his school the Oxford of the East. In architecture alone, the campus lives up to that name. A euphoric blend of clock towers, crenellated battlements, Mughal arches, domes and the staid red brick of Victorian institutions that only India's enthusiastic embrace of all things European could produce, the central campus of Aligarh today is haven to a diverse crowd of male and female, Hindu and Muslim students. Its law and medicine schools are among the top-ranked in India, but so are its arts faculty and Quranic Studies Centre. "With all this diversity, language, culture, secularism was the only way to go forward as a nation," says Aligarh's vice chancellor, P.K. Abdul Azis. "It was the new religion."
This fracture in religious doctrine — whether Islam should embrace the modern or revert to its fundamental origins — between two schools less than a day's donkey ride apart when they were founded, was barely remarked upon at the time. But over the course of the next 100 years, that tiny crack would split Islam into two warring ideologies with repercussions that reverberate around the world to this day. Before the split became a crisis, however, the founders of the Deoband and Aligarh universities shared the common goal of an independent India. Pedagogical leanings were overlooked as students and staff of both institutions joined with Hindus across the subcontinent to remove the yoke of colonial rule in the early decades of the 20th century.
Two Faiths, Two Nations But nationalistic trends were pulling at the fragile alliance, and India began to splinter along ethnic and religious lines. Following World War I, a populist Muslim poet-philosopher by the name of Muhammad Iqbal framed the Islamic zeitgeist when he questioned the position of minority Muslims in a future, independent India. The solution, Iqbal proposed, was an independent state for Muslim-majority provinces in northwestern India, a separate country where Muslims would rule themselves. The idea of Pakistan was born.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Savile Row–suited lawyer who midwifed Pakistan into existence on Aug. 14, 1947, was notoriously ambiguous about how he envisioned the country once it became an independent state. Both he and Iqbal, who were friends until the poet's death in 1938, had repeatedly stated their dream for a "modern, moderate and very enlightened Pakistan," says Sharifuddin Pirzada, Jinnah's personal secretary. Jinnah's own wish was that the Pakistani people, as members of a new, modern and democratic nation, would decide the country's direction.
But rarely in Pakistan's history have its people lived Jinnah's vision of a modern Muslim democracy. Only three times in its 62-year history has Pakistan seen a peaceful, democratic transition of power. With four disparate provinces, more than a dozen languages and dialects, and powerful neighbors, the country's leaders — be they Presidents, Prime Ministers or army chiefs — have been forced to knit the nation together with the only thing Pakistanis have in common: religion.
Following the 1971 civil war, when East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, broke away, the populist Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto embarked on a Muslim-identity program to prevent the country from fracturing further. General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq continued the Islamization campaign when he overthrew Bhutto in 1977, hoping to garner favor with the religious parties, the only constituency available to a military dictator. He instituted Shari'a courts, made blasphemy illegal and established laws that punished fornicators with lashes and held that rape victims could be convicted of adultery. When the Soviet Union invaded neighboring Afghanistan in December 1979, Pakistan was already poised for its own Islamic revolution.
Almost overnight, thousands of refugees poured over the border into Pakistan. Camps mushroomed, and so did madrasahs. Ostensibly created to educate the refugees, they provided the ideal recruiting ground for a new breed of soldier: mujahedin, or holy warriors, trained to vanquish the infidel invaders in America's proxy war with the Soviet Union. Thousands of Pakistanis joined fellow Muslims from across the world to fight the Soviets. As far away as Karachi, high school kids started wearing "jihadi jackets," the pocketed vests popular with the mujahedin. Says Hamid Gul, then head of the Pakistan intelligence agency charged with arming and training the mujahedin: "In the 1980s, the world watched the people of Afghanistan stand up to tyranny, oppression and slavery. The spirit of jihad was rekindled, and it gave a new vision to the youth of Pakistan."
But jihad, as it is described in the Koran, does not end merely with political gain. It ends in a perfect Islamic state. The West's, and Pakistan's, cynical resurrection of something so profoundly powerful and complex unleashed a force that gave root to al-Qaeda's rage, the Taliban's dream of an Islamic utopia in Afghanistan, and in the dozens of radical Islamic groups rapidly replicating themselves in India and around the world today. "The promise of jihad was never fulfilled," says Gul. "Is it any wonder the fighting continues to this day?" Religion may have been used to unite Pakistan, but it is also tearing it apart.
India Today In India, Islam is, in contrast, the other — purged by the British, denigrated by the Hindu right, mistrusted by the majority, marginalized by society. There are nearly as many Muslims in India as in all of Pakistan, but in a nation of more than a billion, they are still a minority, with all the burdens that minorities anywhere carry. Government surveys show that Muslims live shorter, poorer and unhealthier lives than Hindus and are often excluded from the better jobs. To be sure, there are Muslim success stories in the booming economy. Azim Premji, the founder of the outsourcing giant Wipro, is one of the richest individuals in India. But for many Muslims, the inequality of the boom has reinforced their exclusion.
Kashmir, a Muslim-dominated state whose fate had been left undecided in the chaos that led up to partition, remains a suppurating wound in India's Muslim psyche. As the cause of three wars between India and Pakistan — one of which nearly went nuclear in 1999 — Kashmir has become a symbol of profound injustice to Indian Muslims, who believe that their government cares little for Kashmir's claim of independence — which is based upon a 1948 U.N. resolution promising a plebiscite to determine the Kashmiri people's future. That frustration has spilled into the rest of India in the form of several devastating terrorist attacks that have made Indian Muslims both perpetrators and victims.
A mounting sense of persecution, fueled by the government's seeming reluctance to address the brutal anti-Muslim riots that killed more than 2,000 in the state of Gujarat in 2002, has aided the cause of homegrown militant groups. They include the banned Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), which was accused of detonating nine bombs in Mumbai during the course of 2003, killing close to 80. The 2006 terrorist attacks on the Mumbai commuter-rail system that killed 183 people were also blamed on SIMI as well as the pro-Kashmir Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT). Those incidents exposed the all-too-common Hindu belief that Muslims aren't really Indian. "LeT, SIMI — it doesn't matter who was behind these attacks. They are all children of [Pervez] Musharraf," sneered Manish Shah, a Mumbai resident who lost his best friend in the explosions, referring to the then President of Pakistan. In India, unlike Pakistan, Islam does not unify but divide.
Still, many South Asian Muslims insist Islam is the one and only force that can bring the subcontinent together and return it to pre-eminence as a single whole. "We [Muslims] were the legal rulers of India, and in 1857 the British took that away from us," says Tarik Jan, a gentle-mannered scholar at Islamabad's Institute of Policy Studies. "In 1947 they should have given that back to the Muslims." Jan is no militant, but he pines for the golden era of the Mughal period in the 1700s and has a fervent desire to see India, Pakistan and Bangladesh reunited under Islamic rule.
That sense of injustice is at the root of Muslim identity today. It has permeated every aspect of society and forms the basis of rising Islamic radicalism on the subcontinent. "People are hungry for justice," says Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and author of the new book Descent into Chaos. "It is perceived to be the fundamental promise of the Koran." These twin phenomena — the longing many Muslims feel to see their religion restored as the subcontinent's core, and the marks of both piety and extremism Islam bears — reflect the lack of strong political and civic institutions in the region for people to have faith in. If the subcontinent's governments can't provide those institutions, then terrorists like the Trident's mysterious caller will continue asking questions. And providing their own answers.
— With reporting by Jyoti Thottam / Mumbai and Ershad Mahmud / Islamabad

The monster in the mirror by Arundhati Roy

2008-12-13T11:51:00.000-08:00

You sometimes stumble over a piece of writing that transcends conventional rules of writing...its not bound by a single thought, agenda or the rush to establish a particular viewpoint as sacrosanct. It flows from the authors deepest beliefs. Beliefs that are not narrow, blinkered or prejudiced. This ability to 'look beyond' the obvious sets it apart from the run of the mill commentaries that we have all heard a zillion times since the attacks on Mumbai. Its hard not to play the eternal blame game when confronted by indescribable cruelty and gruesome circumstances, as the bombings were. Sadly, our political system has failed us in more ways than one. Not only is there an inherent apathy in th political machinery unless something as drastic as Mumbai happens, there is also a complete lack of the abilty to quit political muck racking and shalllow agenda based knee jerk actions even when confronted by the truth in the face.

There are no good guys or bad guys....there are just role players. I live for the day when India as a whole refuses to fall into the vicious cycle of hatred and Indians as a people take responsibility for their lives instead of entrusting them into the hands of a corrupt few.

Here is the article.
The link to the pages of The Guardian for this article is http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/12/mumbai-arundhati-roy

The Mumbai attacks have been dubbed 'India's 9/11', and there are calls for a 9/11-style response, including an attack on Pakistan. Instead, the country must fight terrorism with justice, or face civil war

Arundhati Roy
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 13 December 2008 00.01 GMT
Article history

We've forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching "India's 9/11". Like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we're expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it's all been said and done before.
As tension in the region builds, US Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that if it didn't act fast to arrest the "Bad Guys" he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on "terrorist camps" in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India's 9/11.
But November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan and India isn't America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.
It's odd how in the last week of November thousands of people in Kashmir supervised by thousands of Indian troops lined up to cast their vote, while the richest quarters of India's richest city ended up looking like war-torn Kupwara – one of Kashmir's most ravaged districts.
The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist attacks on Indian towns and cities this year. Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur and Malegaon have all seen serial bomb blasts in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded. If the police are right about the people they have arrested as suspects, both Hindu and Muslim, all Indian nationals, it obviously indicates that something's going very badly wrong in this country.
If you were watching television you may not have heard that ordinary people too died in Mumbai. They were mowed down in a busy railway station and a public hospital. The terrorists did not distinguish between poor and rich. They killed both with equal cold-bloodedness. The Indian media, however, was transfixed by the rising tide of horror that breached the glittering barricades of India Shining and spread its stench in the marbled lobbies and crystal ballrooms of two incredibly luxurious hotels and a small Jewish centre.
We're told one of these hotels is an icon of the city of Mumbai. That's absolutely true. It's an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day. On a day when the newspapers were full of moving obituaries by beautiful people about the hotel rooms they had stayed in, the gourmet restaurants they loved (ironically one was called Kandahar), and the staff who served them, a small box on the top left-hand corner in the inner pages of a national newspaper (sponsored by a pizza company I think) said "Hungry, kya?" (Hungry eh?). It then, with the best of intentions I'm sure, informed its readers that on the international hunger index, India ranked below Sudan and Somalia. But of course this isn't that war. That one's still being fought in the Dalit bastis of our villages, on the banks of the Narmada and the Koel Karo rivers; in the rubber estate in Chengara; in the villages of Nandigram, Singur, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, Lalgarh in West Bengal and the slums and shantytowns of our gigantic cities.
That war isn't on TV. Yet. So maybe, like everyone else, we should deal with the one that is.
There is a fierce, unforgiving fault-line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let's call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially "Islamist" terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try and place it in a political context, or even try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself.
Side B believes that though nothing can ever excuse or justify terrorism, it exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm's way. Which is a crime in itself.
The sayings of Hafiz Saeed, who founded the Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) in 1990 and who belongs to the hardline Salafi tradition of Islam, certainly bolsters the case of Side A. Hafiz Saeed approves of suicide bombing, hates Jews, Shias and Democracy and believes that jihad should be waged until Islam, his Islam, rules the world. Among the things he said are: "There cannot be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy."
And: "India has shown us this path. We would like to give India a tit-for-tat response and reciprocate in the same way by killing the Hindus, just like it is killing the Muslims in Kashmir."
But where would Side A accommodate the sayings of Babu Bajrangi of Ahmedabad, India, who sees himself as a democrat, not a terrorist? He was one of the major lynchpins of the 2002 Gujarat genocide and has said (on camera): "We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire … we hacked, burned, set on fire … we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it … I have just one last wish … let me be sentenced to death … I don't care if I'm hanged ... just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs [seven or eight hundred thousand] of these people stay ... I will finish them off … let a few more of them die ... at least 25,000 to 50,000 should die."
And where, in Side A's scheme of things, would we place the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh bible, We, or, Our Nationhood Defined by MS Golwalkar, who became head of the RSS in 1944. It says: "Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening."Or: "To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races – the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here ... a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by."
(Of course Muslims are not the only people in the gun sights of the Hindu right. Dalits have been consistently targeted. Recently in Kandhamal in Orissa, Christians were the target of two and a half months of violence which left more than 40 dead. Forty thousand people have been driven from their homes, half of who now live in refugee camps.)
All these years Hafiz Saeed has lived the life of a respectable man in Lahore as the head of the Jamaat-ud Daawa, which many believe is a front organization for the Lashkar-e-Taiba. He continues to recruit young boys for his own bigoted jehad with his twisted, fiery sermons. On December 11 the UN imposed sanctions on the Jammat-ud-Daawa. The Pakistani government succumbed to international pressure and put Hafiz Saeed under house arrest. Babu Bajrangi, however, is out on bail and lives the life of a respectable man in Gujarat. A couple of years after the genocide he left the VHP to join the Shiv Sena. Narendra Modi, Bajrangi's former mentor, is still the chief minister of Gujarat. So the man who presided over the Gujarat genocide was re-elected twice, and is deeply respected by India's biggest corporate houses, Reliance and Tata.
Suhel Seth, a TV impresario and corporate spokesperson, recently said: "Modi is God." The policemen who supervised and sometimes even assisted the rampaging Hindu mobs in Gujarat have been rewarded and promoted. The RSS has 45,000 branches, its own range of charities and 7 million volunteers preaching its doctrine of hate across India. They include Narendra Modi, but also former prime minister AB Vajpayee, current leader of the opposition LK Advani, and a host of other senior politicians, bureaucrats and police and intelligence officers.
If that's not enough to complicate our picture of secular democracy, we should place on record that there are plenty of Muslim organisations within India preaching their own narrow bigotry.
So, on balance, if I had to choose between Side A and Side B, I'd pick Side B. We need context. Always.
In this nuclear subcontinent that context is partition. The Radcliffe Line, which separated India and Pakistan and tore through states, districts, villages, fields, communities, water systems, homes and families, was drawn virtually overnight. It was Britain's final, parting kick to us. Partition triggered the massacre of more than a million people and the largest migration of a human population in contemporary history. Eight million people, Hindus fleeing the new Pakistan, Muslims fleeing the new kind of India left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Each of those people carries and passes down a story of unimaginable pain, hate, horror but yearning too. That wound, those torn but still unsevered muscles, that blood and those splintered bones still lock us together in a close embrace of hatred, terrifying familiarity but also love. It has left Kashmir trapped in a nightmare from which it can't seem to emerge, a nightmare that has claimed more than 60,000 lives. Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, became an Islamic Republic, and then, very quickly a corrupt, violent military state, openly intolerant of other faiths. India on the other hand declared herself an inclusive, secular democracy. It was a magnificent undertaking, but Babu Bajrangi's predecessors had been hard at work since the 1920s, dripping poison into India's bloodstream, undermining that idea of India even before it was born.
By 1990 they were ready to make a bid for power. In 1992 Hindu mobs exhorted by LK Advani stormed the Babri Masjid and demolished it. By 1998 the BJP was in power at the centre. The US war on terror put the wind in their sails. It allowed them to do exactly as they pleased, even to commit genocide and then present their fascism as a legitimate form of chaotic democracy. This happened at a time when India had opened its huge market to international finance and it was in the interests of international corporations and the media houses they owned to project it as a country that could do no wrong. That gave Hindu nationalists all the impetus and the impunity they needed.
This, then, is the larger historical context of terrorism in the subcontinent and of the Mumbai attacks. It shouldn't surprise us that Hafiz Saeed of the Lashkar-e-Taiba is from Shimla (India) and LK Advani of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh is from Sindh (Pakistan).
In much the same way as it did after the 2001 parliament attack, the 2002 burning of the Sabarmati Express and the 2007 bombing of the Samjhauta Express, the government of India announced that it has "incontrovertible" evidence that the Lashkar-e-Taiba backed by Pakistan's ISI was behind the Mumbai strikes. The Lashkar has denied involvement, but remains the prime accused. According to the police and intelligence agencies the Lashkar operates in India through an organisation called the Indian Mujahideen. Two Indian nationals, Sheikh Mukhtar Ahmed, a Special Police Officer working for the Jammu and Kashmir police, and Tausif Rehman, a resident of Kolkata in West Bengal, have been arrested in connection with the Mumbai attacks.
So already the neat accusation against Pakistan is getting a little messy. Almost always, when these stories unspool, they reveal a complicated global network of foot soldiers, trainers, recruiters, middlemen and undercover intelligence and counter-intelligence operatives working not just on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, but in several countries simultaneously. In today's world, trying to pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation state is very much like trying to pin down the provenance of corporate money. It's almost impossible.
In circumstances like these, air strikes to "take out" terrorist camps may take out the camps, but certainly will not "take out" the terrorists. Neither will war. (Also, in our bid for the moral high ground, let's try not to forget that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE of neighbouring Sri Lanka, one of the world's most deadly terrorist groups, were trained by the Indian army.)
Thanks largely to the part it was forced to play as America's ally first in its war in support of the Afghan Islamists and then in its war against them, Pakistan, whose territory is reeling under these contradictions, is careening towards civil war. As recruiting agents for America's jihad against the Soviet Union, it was the job of the Pakistan army and the ISI to nurture and channel funds to Islamic fundamentalist organizations. Having wired up these Frankensteins and released them into the world, the US expected it could rein them in like pet mastiffs whenever it wanted to.
Certainly it did not expect them to come calling in heart of the Homeland on September 11. So once again, Afghanistan had to be violently remade. Now the debris of a re-ravaged Afghanistan has washed up on Pakistan's borders. Nobody, least of all the Pakistan government, denies that it is presiding over a country that is threatening to implode. The terrorist training camps, the fire-breathing mullahs and the maniacs who believe that Islam will, or should, rule the world is mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars. Their ire rains down on the Pakistan government and Pakistani civilians as much, if not more than it does on India.
If at this point India decides to go to war perhaps the descent of the whole region into chaos will be complete. The debris of a bankrupt, destroyed Pakistan will wash up on India's shores, endangering us as never before. If Pakistan collapses, we can look forward to having millions of "non-state actors" with an arsenal of nuclear weapons at their disposal as neighbours. It's hard to understand why those who steer India's ship are so keen to replicate Pakistan's mistakes and call damnation upon this country by inviting the United States to further meddle clumsily and dangerously in our extremely complicated affairs. A superpower never has allies. It only has agents.
On the plus side, the advantage of going to war is that it's the best way for India to avoid facing up to the serious trouble building on our home front. The Mumbai attacks were broadcast live (and exclusive!) on all or most of our 67 24-hour news channels and god knows how many international ones. TV anchors in their studios and journalists at "ground zero" kept up an endless stream of excited commentary. Over three days and three nights we watched in disbelief as a small group of very young men armed with guns and gadgets exposed the powerlessness of the police, the elite National Security Guard and the marine commandos of this supposedly mighty, nuclear-powered nation.
While they did this they indiscriminately massacred unarmed people, in railway stations, hospitals and luxury hotels, unmindful of their class, caste, religion or nationality. (Part of the helplessness of the security forces had to do with having to worry about hostages. In other situations, in Kashmir for example, their tactics are not so sensitive. Whole buildings are blown up. Human shields are used. The U.S and Israeli armies don't hesitate to send cruise missiles into buildings and drop daisy cutters on wedding parties in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.) But this was different. And it was on TV.
The boy-terrorists' nonchalant willingness to kill – and be killed – mesmerised their international audience. They delivered something different from the usual diet of suicide bombings and missile attacks that people have grown inured to on the news. Here was something new. Die Hard 25. The gruesome performance went on and on. TV ratings soared. Ask any television magnate or corporate advertiser who measures broadcast time in seconds, not minutes, what that's worth.
Eventually the killers died and died hard, all but one. (Perhaps, in the chaos, some escaped. We may never know.) Throughout the standoff the terrorists made no demands and expressed no desire to negotiate. Their purpose was to kill people and inflict as much damage as they could before they were killed themselves. They left us completely bewildered. When we say "nothing can justify terrorism", what most of us mean is that nothing can justify the taking of human life. We say this because we respect life, because we think it's precious. So what are we to make of those who care nothing for life, not even their own? The truth is that we have no idea what to make of them, because we can sense that even before they've died, they've journeyed to another world where we cannot reach them.
One TV channel (India TV) broadcast a phone conversation with one of the attackers, who called himself Imran Babar. I cannot vouch for the veracity of the conversation, but the things he talked about were the things contained in the "terror emails" that were sent out before several other bomb attacks in India. Things we don't want to talk about any more: the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the genocidal slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, the brutal repression in Kashmir. "You're surrounded," the anchor told him. "You are definitely going to die. Why don't you surrender?"
"We die every day," he replied in a strange, mechanical way. "It's better to live one day as a lion and then die this way." He didn't seem to want to change the world. He just seemed to want to take it down with him.
If the men were indeed members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, why didn't it matter to them that a large number of their victims were Muslim, or that their action was likely to result in a severe backlash against the Muslim community in India whose rights they claim to be fighting for? Terrorism is a heartless ideology, and like most ideologies that have their eye on the Big Picture, individuals don't figure in their calculations except as collateral damage. It has always been a part of and often even the aim of terrorist strategy to exacerbate a bad situation in order to expose hidden faultlines. The blood of "martyrs" irrigates terrorism. Hindu terrorists need dead Hindus, Communist terrorists need dead proletarians, Islamist terrorists need dead Muslims. The dead become the demonstration, the proof of victimhood, which is central to the project. A single act of terrorism is not in itself meant to achieve military victory; at best it is meant to be a catalyst that triggers something else, something much larger than itself, a tectonic shift, a realignment. The act itself is theatre, spectacle and symbolism, and today, the stage on which it pirouettes and performs its acts of bestiality is Live TV. Even as the attack was being condemned by TV anchors, the effectiveness of the terror strikes were being magnified a thousandfold by TV broadcasts.
Through the endless hours of analysis and the endless op-ed essays, in India at least there has been very little mention of the elephants in the room: Kashmir, Gujarat and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Instead we had retired diplomats and strategic experts debate the pros and cons of a war against Pakistan. We had the rich threatening not to pay their taxes unless their security was guaranteed (is it alright for the poor to remain unprotected?). We had people suggest that the government step down and each state in India be handed over to a separate corporation. We had the death of former prime minster VP Singh, the hero of Dalits and lower castes and villain of Upper caste Hindus pass without a mention.
We had Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City and co-writer of the Bollywood film Mission Kashmir, give us his version of George Bush's famous "Why they hate us" speech. His analysis of why religious bigots, both Hindu and Muslim hate Mumbai: "Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness." His prescription: "The best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever." Didn't George Bush ask Americans to go out and shop after 9/11? Ah yes. 9/11, the day we can't seem to get away from.
Though one chapter of horror in Mumbai has ended, another might have just begun. Day after day, a powerful, vociferous section of the Indian elite, goaded by marauding TV anchors who make Fox News look almost radical and leftwing, have taken to mindlessly attacking politicians, all politicians, glorifying the police and the army and virtually asking for a police state. It isn't surprising that those who have grown plump on the pickings of democracy (such as it is) should now be calling for a police state. The era of "pickings" is long gone. We're now in the era of Grabbing by Force, and democracy has a terrible habit of getting in the way.
Dangerous, stupid television flashcards like the Police are Good Politicians are Bad/Chief Executives are Good Chief Ministers are Bad/Army is Good Government is Bad/ India is Good Pakistan is Bad are being bandied about by TV channels that have already whipped their viewers into a state of almost uncontrollable hysteria.
Tragically, this regression into intellectual infancy comes at a time when people in India were beginning to see that in the business of terrorism, victims and perpetrators sometimes exchange roles. It's an understanding that the people of Kashmir, given their dreadful experiences of the last 20 years, have honed to an exquisite art. On the mainland we're still learning. (If Kashmir won't willingly integrate into India, it's beginning to look as though India will integrate/disintegrate into Kashmir.)
It was after the 2001 parliament attack that the first serious questions began to be raised. A campaign by a group of lawyers and activists exposed how innocent people had been framed by the police and the press, how evidence was fabricated, how witnesses lied, how due process had been criminally violated at every stage of the investigation. Eventually the courts acquitted two out of the four accused, including SAR Geelani, the man whom the police claimed was the mastermind of the operation. A third, Showkat Guru, was acquitted of all the charges brought against him but was then convicted for a fresh, comparatively minor offence. The supreme court upheld the death sentence of another of the accused, Mohammad Afzal. In its judgment the court acknowledged there was no proof that Mohammed Afzal belonged to any terrorist group, but went on to say, quite shockingly, "The collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender." Even today we don't really know who the terrorists that attacked the Indian parliament were and who they worked for.
More recently, on September 19 this year, we had the controversial "encounter" at Batla House in Jamia Nagar, Delhi, where the Special Cell of the Delhi police gunned down two Muslim students in their rented flat under seriously questionable circumstances, claiming that they were responsible for serial bombings in Delhi, Jaipur and Ahmedabad in 2008. An assistant commissioner of Police, Mohan Chand Sharma, who played a key role in the parliament attack investigation, lost his life as well. He was one of India's many "encounter specialists" known and rewarded for having summarily executed several "terrorists". There was an outcry against the Special Cell from a spectrum of people, ranging from eyewitnesses in the local community to senior Congress Party leaders, students, journalists, lawyers, academics and activists all of whom demanded a judicial inquiry into the incident. In response, the BJP and LK Advani lauded Mohan Chand Sharma as a "Braveheart" and launched a concerted campaign in which they targeted those who had dared to question the integrity of the police, saying it was "suicidal" and calling them "anti-national". Of course there has been no inquiry.
Only days after the Batla House event, another story about "terrorists" surfaced in the news. In a report submitted to a sessions court, the CBI said that a team from Delhi's Special Cell (the same team that led the Batla House encounter, including Mohan Chand Sharma) had abducted two innocent men, Irshad Ali and Moarif Qamar, in December 2005, planted 2kg of RDX and two pistols on them and then arrested them as "terrorists" who belonged to Al Badr (which operates out of Kashmir). Ali and Qamar who have spent years in jail, are only two examples out of hundreds of Muslims who have been similarly jailed, tortured and even killed on false charges.
This pattern changed in October 2008 when Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) that was investigating the September 2008 Malegaon blasts arrested a Hindu preacher Sadhvi Pragya, a self-styled God man Swami Dayanand Pande and Lt Col Purohit, a serving officer of the Indian Army. All the arrested belong to Hindu Nationalist organizations including a Hindu Supremacist group called Abhinav Bharat. The Shiv Sena, the BJP and the RSS condemned the Maharashtra ATS, and vilified its chief, Hemant Karkare, claiming he was part of a political conspiracy and declaring that "Hindus could not be terrorists". LK Advani changed his mind about his policy on the police and made rabble rousing speeches to huge gatherings in which he denounced the ATS for daring to cast aspersions on holy men and women.
On the November 25 newspapers reported that the ATS was investigating the high profile VHP Chief Pravin Togadia's possible role in the Malegaon blasts. The next day, in an extraordinary twist of fate, Hemant Karkare was killed in the Mumbai Attacks. The chances are that the new chief whoever he is, will find it hard to withstand the political pressure that is bound to be brought on him over the Malegaon investigation.
While the Sangh Parivar does not seem to have come to a final decision over whether or not it is anti-national and suicidal to question the police, Arnab Goswami, anchorperson of Times Now television, has stepped up to the plate. He has taken to naming, demonising and openly heckling people who have dared to question the integrity of the police and armed forces. My name and the name of the well-known lawyer Prashant Bhushan have come up several times. At one point, while interviewing a former police officer, Arnab Goswami turned to camera: "Arundhati Roy and Prashant Bhushan," he said, "I hope you are watching this. We think you are disgusting." For a TV anchor to do this in an atmosphere as charged and as frenzied as the one that prevails today, amounts to incitement as well as threat, and would probably in different circumstances have cost a journalist his or her job.
So according to a man aspiring to be the next prime minister of India, and another who is the public face of a mainstream TV channel, citizens have no right to raise questions about the police. This in a country with a shadowy history of suspicious terror attacks, murky investigations, and fake "encounters". This in a country that boasts of the highest number of custodial deaths in the world and yet refuses to ratify the International Covenant on Torture. A country where the ones who make it to torture chambers are the lucky ones because at least they've escaped being "encountered" by our Encounter Specialists. A country where the line between the Underworld and the Encounter Specialists virtually does not exist.
How should those of us whose hearts have been sickened by the knowledge of all of this view the Mumbai attacks, and what are we to do about them? There are those who point out that US strategy has been successful inasmuch as the United States has not suffered a major attack on its home ground since 9/11. However, some would say that what America is suffering now is far worse. If the idea behind the 9/11 terror attacks was to goad America into showing its true colors, what greater success could the terrorists have asked for? The US army is bogged down in two unwinnable wars, which have made the United States the most hated country in the world. Those wars have contributed greatly to the unraveling of the American economy and who knows, perhaps eventually the American empire. (Could it be that battered, bombed Afghanistan, the graveyard of the Soviet Union, will be the undoing of this one too?) Hundreds of thousands people including thousands of American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The frequency of terrorist strikes on U.S allies/agents (including India) and U.S interests in the rest of the world has increased dramatically since 9/11. George Bush, the man who led the US response to 9/11 is a despised figure not just internationally, but also by his own people. Who can possibly claim that the United States is winning the war on terror?
Homeland Security has cost the US government billions of dollars. Few countries, certainly not India, can afford that sort of price tag. But even if we could, the fact is that this vast homeland of ours cannot be secured or policed in the way the United States has been. It's not that kind of homeland. We have a hostile nuclear weapons state that is slowly spinning out of control as a neighbour, we have a military occupation in Kashmir and a shamefully persecuted, impoverished minority of more than 150 million Muslims who are being targeted as a community and pushed to the wall, whose young see no justice on the horizon, and who, were they to totally lose hope and radicalise, end up as a threat not just to India, but to the whole world. If ten men can hold off the NSG commandos, and the police for three days, and if it takes half a million soldiers to hold down the Kashmir valley, do the math. What kind of Homeland Security can secure India?
Nor for that matter will any other quick fix. Anti-terrorism laws are not meant for terrorists; they're for people that governments don't like. That's why they have a conviction rate of less than 2%. They're just a means of putting inconvenient people away without bail for a long time and eventually letting them go. Terrorists like those who attacked Mumbai are hardly likely to be deterred by the prospect of being refused bail or being sentenced to death. It's what they want.
What we're experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet's squelching under our feet.
The only way to contain (it would be naïve to say end) terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We're standing at a fork in the road. One sign says Justice, the other Civil War. There's no third sign and there's no going back. Choose

Facing failure

2008-10-02T11:42:00.000-07:00

We all come to our nemesis, at one point or another, and the question then is, do we let it defeat us or conquer it once and for all. For me, the nemesis has always been, ‘facing failure’……Not because I’ve never failed, but because I’ve never found the strength, the guts, the largeness of heart that it needs to say – I’ve failed this time, but its no big deal, I am still what I am ……….How many of us have allowed ourselves to be judged by our latest exam/interview/assessment result?How many of us live from one goalpost to another, forgetting to ‘live’ in between? Why are results a statement on the person? ‘The person’ is so much else……Life is about who you are and not about how others look at you. Not about what people who don’t matter, think of you………Its about making the best of the moments you have with people who do matter.Somewhere in your life, you come across a defining moment. And I wonder how many of us would wander back the memory lane to a moment of abject defeat rather than wondrous triumph. For its easy to lose yourself in victory but far more worthwhile to ‘find’ yourself in defeat.Just as I was about to get trapped long term into being the typical yuppie with my platter full of the stresses and pressures of modern day living, I got rescued. It was after a long day at work, I’d glared or honked my horn at every other driver trying to get past me in the rush hour traffic, in a bid to get home and ‘get some work done’. But as soon as I found a parking slot, it started to pour down torrentially. Now, if you are in Scotland, rain is something you get used to. But this was more like a tropical downpour. So, there I sat, immobilised, watching as nature took all controls away. And I slowly felt my tensions ebbing away…..the muscles in my body physically relax, and the constant humdrum of noises inside my brain subside. I lost count of the minues I spent just watching. Watching the green of the trees go greener, watching the neighbours’ bubbly cocker spaniel go sprinting past, watching as car after car sped by…..all in a rush to get somewhere, to accomplish something. And then I suddenly realised that my ‘to do’ list had vanished….it wasn’t important anymore..things could wait. I couldn’t be bothered to get to the next career goalpost before everyone else got there..even if it got classed as ‘failure’. Anyone who has been circling in this vortex of deadline after deadline, never ending lists and unfinished jobs will no doubt recognise the sense of entrapment that this brings. Its so easy to lose sight of whats important in life. Ive seen someone very close to me go through a series of events which people would conventionally describe as failures….and manage to smile through all of them, manage to see the funny side, manage to square his shoulders everytime and go for the next challenge. This to me is lasting success. Failure, at times does what a million successes cannot do- redeem your soul.Somehow our generation more than any other feels this compulsion to constantly keep proving ourselves……to anybody and everybody who’d care to notice. I happen to belong to this genre of ‘ambitious career oriented women’ (here’s a category - for those who like to see people neatly slotted) - who always carry, not just a chip but a massive block on their shoulders. Its amazing how rapidly the face of the typical yuppie city corporate culture is changing from the alpha male to super-driven female. So, this goes out to everyone who’s running in a bid to be the rat race topper……..hope you get a chance to redeem yourself before all the important things in life are lost forever. Amen.

Beauty and the beast within

2008-10-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

In my parents day and age, the chief worries in life were job security, having a home of your own, and good education for your children. Fast forward thirty years on and I have a neighbour whose only worry in life is those two extra lines on her face and the secretary at my workplace has just booked herself in to have a nose job in a bid to enhance her self esteem.
According to latest figures, the total UK cosmetic surgery industry was worth an estimated £528.9m, showing a 53% rise in 2006 alone. An average British woman spends anywhere between £5000 to £10000 on cosmetic surgery/non surgical procedures yearly. The cosmetic surgery market is being driven by an astonishing speed of technological advancements, particularly in non-surgical procedures. Combined treatments involving the use of a number of different types of non-surgical treatment — laser, injectables and peels, as well as the use of cosmeceuticals — is an increasing feature of the market. In terms of surgical procedures, facial surgery is now offered with minimally invasive techniques, encouraging a trend of `lunch-time lifts' where the woman can often be back at work shortly after a fairly major procedure!While I fully appreciate that cosmetic surgery in certain situations, especially in victims of accidents and disfigurement, is not only desirable but also essential, it’s the ‘worried well’ section of our population that seems to be the predominant user. In other words, there is nothing wrong with these women (and men- in 2005 about 11% of all procedures were performed on men).
There is a mad rush to get the latest tummy tuck, the plumpest lips and the biggest bust around. Its getting difficult day by day to find a person who isn’t planning or hasn’t already had some form of cosmetic makeover done. It’s as if self esteem was just discovered yesterday.......because without cosmetic surgery you have no personality, no presence and nobody loves you. If you are fifty, then you have to look twenty and if you happen to be twenty, then you have to get the perfectly shaped bottom. Your glass is always half empty.Poor Narcissus was just kidding himself, wasn’t he? He had no idea what being beauty conscious meant….he was quite content to just stare at his spectacularly imperfect face and had no hope of finding the dashing, dynamic surgeon with the magical touch to lift him out of his ‘meaningless’ existence.
In an ideal world, people would accept themselves as they are, accept that flaws can be attractive, and growing old is natural and not necessarily bad. I am not deluded enough to think that looks would cease to be important to people one fine day. Caring about how you look is an inherent human instinct that has to find the right way of expression. But its not too much to expect that as intelligent, sensible human beings we’d find better ways of feeling good about ourselves rather that changing external appearances to the point of destruction. I am not even going to go down the route of suggesting that people use these megabucks that they’ve saved up for cosmetic surgery to help some of their less privileged earthlings, but it may just solve the purpose, you know. It may just make you feel as good if not better about yourself and there is just a chance that this feeling will last slightly longer than it takes an artificial tan to wear off.
Now a cosmetic surgeon in Florida has even gone on to publish a picture guide to help young kids understand the exact process involved in making their mummies beautiful (http://www.news.com.au). For after all, as a kid aged five or six, that is your biggest concern in life – having a mummy with a jelly belly or a crooked nose would just be a catastrophe!As an amused and at times frankly miffed bystander to this trend, I’ve struggled to explain this fixation with looks that is now part of our everyday life. Aside from the fact that it costs the earth, its also totally useless if its friends or love you’re after. A cosmetic makeover will not win you friends, or happiness, only dig a huge hole in your pocket. While looking good has been important since time immemorial, the recent trend where it supercedes all else in life is decidedly unhealthy. In some households, a substantial chunk of the family income is now spent on beauty makeovers.Alarmingly, big corporate sharks have jumped onto the bandwagon and are offering easier access to borrowing for this purpose!The amount of column space that’s dedicated in women’s magazines to discussion of which celebrity has cellulite and which other one has piled on a few millimeters on their abdomen, is another story altogether.Besides, before luring a thirty something, mother of two towards the operation table, how many of these clinics actually care to fully explain the implications? The ugly truth behind these panacea procedures is that if anything goes wrong, you run the risk of being horribly disfigured and in the worst case scenario, die from sepsis or anesthetic complications. Cases have been reported but they are few and far between to have made any significant impression on the minds of would be wannabes.Just another example of how too much of a good thing can actually be a bad thing. The quest for happiness and success has many different connotations. Some find happiness altering their bodies, some find it in the smile of another human being.

Of Lilliputians and the brain dead

2008-10-02T11:31:00.000-07:00

Still remember the story as told by Jonathan Swift….Gulliver’s travels…part of my school curriculum in class 4…. or was it 5……And I remember it not because I found it inspirational, hugely entertaining, or a tremendous work of satirical writing……the brain of a nine year old is not mature enough to comprehend any of these. But I remember it because my nine year old brain had perceived it to be utterly atrocious…..how can someone be so shockingly ignorant as to kill for as inane an issue as which side would you break your egg from and indeed give rise to civil strife and social unrest on this issue?? Little did I realise that not only is this atrocious behaviour perfectly feasible but I actually live in a society that may have been picked out of Gulliver’s travels…..that people actually kill for a lot less, that the divides actually are founded on a far more flimsy ground than how to shell an egg…..As a teenager I learnt to be suspicious of one religious group, to distance myself from a particular community, not because we ever had such a discussion at home but because as soon as I stepped out of home I looked into the eyes of diffidence, distrust and difference. The media would be rife with talk of religious riots breaking out in one place or members of one caste stoning to death someone from another caste. And it didn’t matter that I still did not understand how any issue, or difference of opinion, or a difference in lifestyle could ever overtake the sanctity of life………My impressionable brain had to learn to quickly adjust to the information being fed in. This was almost always viewpoints of someone on television talking too loudly or in the newspapers, pouring vitriolic about how one particular section of society had been victimised…..I still meant to ask – what about the other side?….are they as bitter and angry about their loss as you are about yours’? Are they grieving for the dead too? Are they homeless and abandoned too?But obviously the world is governed by men who do not think these questions are Important. Whats important at that time is to flame the fires of religious hatred, and work people’s emotions to your advantage…..has happened for centuries..still continues to happen and will keep happening until we can stand up and say we’ve had enough. Naïve, simple minded men have always been a pawn in the game for power hungry, greedy politicians who cant be bothered about the consequences of their dangerous actions.Once any two groups of people start to fight, to kill and maime men, women and children from the opposite side there is often no going back. We’ve seen generations of people trapped in the quagmire of hatred and bitterness….often, the initial reason for the strife completely forgotten. Because hatred begets hatred………it’s a vicious cycle…..Ive always believed there are only two kinds of people in this world- good and bad. There are good people amongst the muslims, good people amongst the jews, the christians, the hindus, the whites, the blacks, the ‘browns’, the rich and the poor. The rest are all artificial divides…..nothing that cannot be surmounted with effort and will. My best friend will be someone I can share thoughts and experiences with, have a rapport with, share common ground with. He/ she doesn’t have to go to the same place of worship as me, eat the same kind of food or even speak the same language that I do.Based on the premise that all men (and women!) have the same origin…..be it adam and eve or be it Manu……..is it not beyond ridiculous that we’ve taken to killing each other over petty differences. And I’m not being blasé in calling these differences petty….If you look at the history of mankind, all war has been perpetrated to gain dominance over that other man that does not look like you, does not dress like you and prays to a different god.A bit like, you don’t shell your egg like me,………….so I must kill you, isn’t it?
So there are 6 inch men that fight over trivia and then there are the ones amongst us with wood between our ears who've resisted the voice of reason for so long, its now second nature.

Universal smoking ban in public places. Why we need it.

2008-10-02T11:29:00.000-07:00

"Your dog mess - you bin it." We have all come across this sign posted at public places. For a society that wrinkles its nose in collective disgust at something as innoucous as dog turds adorning its streets, are we not supra tolerant towards another more vicious aggression on our senses and sensibilities?? Dog turds might be un- aesthetic but they dont give you cancer!!!So much so that although dog poop in public places is illegal, we've been huffing and puffing about bringing a legislation to ban smoking in public places and have yet to succeed.The argument is that every individual has a right to decide what is best for him/her. And so if I stare at the 17 yr old blowing smoke into my face at the bus stop, she stares doubly hard at me.......but honey, your freedom ends where my nose begins......you are welcome to your noxious fumes but you have no right to pollute the air I breathe.I have a suggestion.....just for the time being while we are still debating the feasibility of a complete ban on smoking, why not get smokers to "bin their own mess" as it were. Every smoker in my opinion should take around a bag to exhale in, to absorb smoke. Of course we'll have to come up with a suitable contraption but that's a thought for the world's enterprising lot.In fact, why not get the multi-million dollar cigarette industry to "cough up" a few million towards this end??

"Terrorists are victims who create more victims"

2008-10-01T15:54:00.000-07:00

Found this very inspiring article in the Times of India (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Terrorists_are_victims_who_create_more_victims/articleshow/3550892.cms)

We've all tried to grapple with this hideous truth of our times. Reality is, we all fall prey to the motivation of these acts and create this vicious cycle of hatred and anger that breeds more terrorists. Inasmuch, I found this article fresh and insightful. No attempt at pointing fingers, laying blame, stoking the fires of vengeance. Just plainspeak and clear thinking, looking at solutins rather than being part of the problem. Have a read....
2 Oct 2008, 0019 hrs IST,TNN

Midway through the news meeting on Wednesday, the grim news came in: Agartala had been rocked by serial blasts. All eyes immediately turned to Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, the Guest Editor for our special Peace Edition. As journalists, what should we do on a day like this? The Zen master, who has rebuilt bombed villages, set up schools and medical centres, resettled homeless families and for a lifetime advocated tirelessly the principles of non-violence and compassionate action, pondered for a while. When he spoke, it was with great clarity, ''Report in a way that invites readers to take a look at why such things continue to happen and that they have their roots in anger, fear, hate and wrong perceptions. Prevent anger from becoming a collective energy. The only antidote for anger and violence is compassion. Terrorists are also victims, who create other victims of misunderstanding.'' This, remember, is the monk — now 82 years old — credited with a big role in turning American public opinion against the war in Vietnam — for which Martin Luther King Jr had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. And so, his words are not to be dismissed lightly. ''Every reader has seeds of fear, anger, violence and despair, and also seeds of hope, compassion, love and forgiveness,'' said Thich Nhat Hahn, affectionately called Thay. ''As journalists, you must not water the wrong seeds. The stories should touch the seeds of hope. As journalists, you have the job of selectively watering the right seeds. You must attempt to tell the truth and yet not water the seeds of hate. It's not what's in the story, but how you tell it that's important.'' But how should the State deal with terror? Thay's answer: ''We should invite those who believe they are victims of discrimination and injustice to speak about it. We should initiate sessions of deep listening and invite deeply spiritual people, who don't have to be famous, to attend these. We must televise these sessions nationally. I am sure you will see a dramatic drop in the level of violence. A war on terror cannot succeed, because you cannot bomb perceptions. The only solution is dialogue.'' He cited the example of an experiment by his own group of monks at Plum village, south of France, in 2006. ''We asked people to write letters to terrorists and more than 40 letters came in. Some claimed, 'I am the terrorist because I am also violent and there is suffering in me as well'. We need to get together. When we address suspicion and anger as a collective, when we talk informally about suffering, then we can find answers. If we reduce the violence in us, and change, then we change others around us because then we are connected to them.'' Talking about world peace, the monk said, ''Political leaders meet at peace summits but no lasting solutions to the world's problems are found. Therefore, political leaders, before they get down to talking at summits, should practice sitting, walking, talking informally with each other and practice techniques to calm themselves. Only then can talks lead to positive results.'' The history of Vietnam in the last century was fraught with violence. Thay has himself seen war from close quarters. Naturally, the question came up: Does he believe non-violence can help find solutions in today's complex world? Thay's reply was surprisingly pragmatic. ''Non-violence can never be absolute. However, you can make aggressive action less violent. In war, the generals must try and avoid the death of innocents. Even soldiers can show compassion. The first step towards nonviolence is to be calm and compassionate yourself.'' Questions on wars and conflicts led to the next logical query. How can humanity relate with each other when it is divided within confines of national or ethnic or racial identities? That brought the Buddhist teacher into his element, propounding on one of Buddhism's basic tenets of 'non-self'. The problem, he said, arises when one's self is set against another's self. Once we realize that self is made of non-self, then the issue of identity gets settled. ''Man is made of non-me elements. I am made of so many non-me elements — my parents, the food I eat, the education I received, animals, vegetables. Take away all the 'non-me', and there is no 'me' left. Buddhism is made of non-Buddhist elements. A Christian is made of non-Christian elements and a Muslim is made of non-Muslim elements,'' said Thay. Once we realise that we are all interconnected, we will begin caring for all other things. That's why, Thay says, we need to learn from suffering. Because only after we have understood the nature of suffering can we understand true happiness. ''Happiness and safety can't be individual matters. If you have peace on your side, only then can you promote peace in the world. Individual happiness is impossible, as is individual suffering. Because we are not one but a collective.'' And what about the financial crisis that is causing many to suffer? The answer, says Thay, is related to greed and fear. ''As journalists, you must help people so that they don't become victims of greed and fear. If the aim is happiness, then you must be prepared to give up riches and fame and power, all of which are transitory.'' Can the modern economy — fuelled by conspicuous consumption — co-exist with a monk's lifestyle? After all, if everyone stopped consumption, industries would shut down and unemployment would rise. So should individuals, in their pursuit of 'selfish' happiness, create unhappiness for others? ''Many of us have started believing in happiness from consumption. But happiness is largely a problem of the mind. You don't have to run into the future, you have enough conditions to be happy right here and now. But in our search for more conditions to be happy, we sacrifice the present. The remedy for us is to go home to the present moment. Don't get stuck with the past or get sucked into the future. So many wonders of life are with you. Development is like a wild horse that we are riding, over which we have lost control,'' responded Thay. But then, isn't it much simpler for a monk to talk about not consuming than for people who have to deal with the world on the world's terms? Can regular people with regular lives follow his teachings? According to Thay, ''The meditative practice is for everyone, monks and non-monks, the young and the less young. The conditions for reaching out for Buddha-hood are there for everyone. We are just caught up in our worries and projects. The kingdom of God is available for you. But are you available for the kingdom?'' We couldn't resist asking: what were his feelings when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas? His reply: ''There was no anger. We have a tendency to punish whoever has dared to make us suffer. We seek relief by making the other person suffer. If we see whoever is hurt as a victim, then a neuro pathway will open in our brain and we will forgive the person and reduce his suffering, which in turn will help us to suffer less. All this is not based on speculation but on the basis what we have done, in our group sessions.

London revisited..

2008-10-01T15:07:00.000-07:00

Its a supremely spledid city...full of new surprises and those little curio moments..

Plus, a whole cauldron of different cultures, races, ways of life, languages, people. Food of course I've mentioned.

This time we made a slightly rushed but very fulfilling visit to the Swaminarayan temple in Neasden area. The architecture of the temple follows the general model of the Swaminarayan sect and is breathtaking. Pic by Rohit..

And if you go there dont forget to go to the temple restaurant. Its full of good old gujarati food...awesome dhoklas. Plus they have really nice mithais. Needless to say, we had a huge package to take back home...

There are the slightly puzzling aspects though for the uninitiated....Their insistence that all females in skirts wrap a 'sarong style' cloth before going in, being one of them. Places of worship for centuries were just that- places where you went to find inner peace and sanctity, without worrying about what other people thought about your style of dressing. No one would go to a temple wanting to be disrespectful. But having to follow pre-ordained dress codes can be a little paiful for some of us.

Arranged marriage

2008-10-01T14:59:00.000-07:00

So, the question was popped again…..mmm…. was your’s an arranged marriage then? The eternal curiosity…
One topic which I suppose every Indian abroad has to tread through.

I’m amused and irritated in turn….especially when I detect a whiff of patronising…
Why is this such a difficult concept to master? Having seen the various ways in which marriages are ‘arranged’ apart from the family way which we know in India, the question to me always smacks of mock sympathy…for the ways of the 'less civilized'.
Sure, every culture has its own curious ways…its own idiosyncrasies that only people born into the culture will understand.
Saying that I’m not trying to brush under the carpet, a whole lot of questionable ways in which this business is carried out, in all sections of the Indian society.
But spare me the sympathy, please.

For more insight on signficance of wedding customs in India, you can check out http://indianweddingcustoms.blogspot.com/
Useful info....

Rohit.....

2008-07-02T14:35:00.000-07:00

He’s standing in the kitchen with a big fat dollop of butter on his spoon…ready to mouth it, when I scream – “ROHIT, STOP.” He’s suddenly very lost.
“What?”
“You can’t eat butter like that.”
Now he wears an expression of deep hurt and looks well and truly offended.
“But this is olive butter. It’s supposed to be healthy!” He says, pure exasperation on my foolhardiness now evident in his voice.
“Its still butter. You CAN’T eat it like that.”
A few fleeting moments of eye contact and then…..he gobbles what’s on the spoon, and runs…………..with me shrieking after him trying to retrieve the box.

That’s Rohit. My life partner, soulmate, bedrock…

Yeah, So Rohit is a food buff……when we moved to the UK, we were both freshly out of medical college, just starting work. In other words neither of us had a clue as to how to go about setting up home. Plus, as far as food was concerned, we got by mostly on microwave stuff from the supermarket, neither of us having the time or energy left after a busy on call shift, to cook.

I’ve got to say, my other half happens to be extremely talented where public relations is concerned. So, within no time of moving into a new flat, Rohit had gathered all the strategic information.

“The couple across the passage are marwaris”, he said one day, looking positively ecstatic as if their being marwari had just opened the gateways of heaven for us.
“The wife doesn’t work which means she’s got plenty of time.”
“Yeah, so what?” – I still didn’t get it. Anyway, he set about…

Couple of days later, I returned from work, to find bhabhiji teaching Rohit how to cook.
“Rohit’s told me everything,” she said – “how you people haven’t had a proper meal for ages. And you burnt the daal y’day”. She said to me with the utmost sympathy, with a look of pure pity in her eyes.
Now this wasn’t strictly true, but I decided it was best to keep mum. Believe me, it was worth the humiliation of being the object of pity. Because then, the food began to arrive- she’d send me gulab jamuns one day and kachoris the next. Bhabhiji firmy believed she was rescuing two poor souls from near starvation as we were totally incapable of taking care of ourselves. She’d taken us under her wings. Life was sweet.

Manisha...

2008-07-02T13:35:00.000-07:00

Manisha and Taral have been good friends for long. I still remember that first meeting at mutual friends. I was sitting talking to someone when suddenly, all conversation ceased and all I could hear was female tones in rapid marathi, almost 50 decibles higher than anyone else in the room. As to what she was saying, only a couple of people in the room could make out. But all of us had to listen as it was near impossible carrying out any other conversation in the room with her bombastic voice next to us. That was Manisha.
Her loud talk still remains a prominent feature but since then Ive discovered so many different aspects of her personality. She’s an excellent cook, both her and Taral having busy medical careers, she still finds time to think of every tiny detail to do with her two boy’s upbringing. Since prakhar, her elder son was born with several medical problems, he still is under follow up and needs a lot of care at home. Never once have I heard her complain or crib about the several hundred demands on her time. Or about the fact that she has had to put her career on the back burner to be able to give enough time to Prakhar and Taral who was grappling with his own demanding work life.
She’s now taken up a staff grade post in the NHS which gives her enough flexibility to be able to juggle home and career.

So far so good…..I haven’t come to Manisha’s USP though - ‘talk before you think’.
As per Amit, she’s like the car which has lost its filter AND silencer…….
So, she keeps the conversations lively. They keep coming, one liners to big fat juicy monologues, at top speed and full volume! Happy times.
(P.S.- Amit is Pratima’s husband.)

P.S- afterthoughts on the kids situation.

2008-06-26T07:18:00.000-07:00

Now I have this boss who is the epitome of being organised, planned and entirely predictable. Patricia has never veered from the straight and the narrow all her life. You can just see that in her every move. From the rolling of eyes with impatience when someone is being, in her opinion, daft, to the sneer of derision she reserves for the softies, the imperfect people of this world who let emotions rule their decisions.
She hardly ever wastes words. Just looks through you if she thinks your question doesn’t merit a response. And when she does speak its always measured, precise. When she does smile, its always within half an inch of the corners of her mouth. No one at the workplace has seen her laugh out loud. She must be, if I can hazard a guess, late thirties with a style of dressing that definitely belongs in the late sixties to seventies. Loose tops or shirts, severe, always below the knee skirts in shades of beige or gray – you get the picture. Now I had so far conveniently slotted Patricia in the ‘slightly elderly spinster’ category. When yesterday, the bombshell dropped and we found out she actually has two adorable sons. Just like Patricia, grunted one of the blokes, bloody perfect. So, she’s managed two pregnancies, without taking any leave beyond what’s absolutely essential.
I can see how she would have just carried on, ‘business as usual style’ during her pregnancy, have the most well coordinated and timely delivery and the most disciplined brood in town. Does this inspire me to achieve what she has, without compromising her career? God, no.
I would want my children to be full of mischief! I would want the whole plethora of emotions, uncertainties, unpredictabilities that come with raising kids. I can’t be mechanical. I cant be a robot and still pretend to be happy. So, sadly for Pratima, plans to have kids have been shelved once again.

The big dilemma

2008-06-26T06:56:00.000-07:00

I’m still smarting under the effect of Pratima’s rather long spiel….on the topic of children, or actually the lack of them in my life. The thing about this particular discussion is, not only is it always forced- with me looking for that tiny chink in the door so I could just vaporize through it, it also almost always leaves me feeling selfish and self centered. As if I’m committing a grave injustice towards all my family, all my friends who have kids, and to myself too even if I don’t realize it.
So Pratima, who basically married at the age of 22 and had two kids before she turned 28, thinks I’m way too late to have a family. She also put her career on hold and postponed her postgraduation in fashion designing, so Amit (her husband) could pursue his high demand medical career. Rohit assures me there’s no similarity whatsoever in my personality and hers’. So I can't judge my life by her yardstick. Which is very sweet and ‘chivalrous husband’ like of him. Only, I still feel restless.

I have long been aware of the importance of being a ‘DINK’ couple - which is essentially short for Double Income No Kids. Now, whoever coined this term was I think, essentially thinking of the money side. It is expensive to bring up kids and with either of the couple having to work flexibly/ cut down etc, it’s a big financial responsibility. I do enjoy my current status as freshly (well, that’s about four years ago) married without kids, but for slightly different reasons. Like the other weekend we suddenly decided we needed a bit of a break, so we drove out to the coast for a couple of days. People with kids simply don’t have that kind of freedom. It’s my freedom and availability of choice that I feel I can’t let go. That’s not to say I would not want kids ever, but at the moment life is quite full, thank you.

In our society, as in any other, peer pressure to keep climbing the ladder of social responsibility or ‘appropriateness’ is quite high. Obviously there are set time limits for a girl to get married, for a married woman to have children and for someone with children to…ugh, I don’t know, move to a bigger house in the suburbs, give up on all sorts of fun things that you used to enjoy as a couple and get set in the routine of bringing up kids…for which there is a strict protocol by the way. That is not to say people who are bringing up kids are boring or have uninteresting lives. I just don’t fancy that at the current moment of time, that’s all. In fact I truly admire Pratima for what she has been for her kids – they are the sweetest, most well behaved and charming kids I’ve seen.

So, jury is still out on whether there’s a particular age cut off by which everybody should have kids and settle into domesticity. Or whether you should just follow your instincts, not worry about ticking biological clocks and take life as it comes….
Something to think about….

Finding the perfect food niche in London

2008-06-07T15:36:00.000-07:00

London is such a melting pot of different cultures and lifestyles that its quite easy to lose yourself in the pace of the city as well as the constant sea of people. Was there recently for a conference and found the most delightful Indian food I’ve ever tasted.
The thing about food is, no matter how much you get adapted to and begin to like different varieties, at the end of the day, you always hanker for food you’ve grown up with. So, we went on complete rampage around town and had perfect Gujarati, Punjabi as well as perfect south Indian food (one of my favourites – I can eat dosa everyday, something Rohit finds completely beyond comprehension).
Anyway, the surprise find was this place that served, what can only be called ‘Indo-Chinese’ food. You know how Chinese food in every country gets modified according to local tastes to the point that its no longer Chinese (bless multiculturalism). Now Chinese you have in India is NOT Chinese (well, mostly). So, imagine this feeling of total ecstasy we had on seeing ‘Gobi Manchurian’ on the menu. And Chow-mein with ‘Rai tadka’! Pure Heaven!

By the way, Rohit let slip recently (I think he was feeling nostalgic and rather overcome with emotion after our trip) that his childhood dream, from the earliest he can remember, was to have a wife who would cook fantastic meals for him on a daily basis. The man loves his food. So, while this dream has unfortunately not been realised, he did get a Mom-in -law who absolutely dotes on him and is also a fab cook. And I always tell him I've brought out the best in him by letting him explore his cooking skills so that he's now an accomplished cook himself....

The first goalpost........

2008-06-07T09:34:00.000-07:00

Who said life begins at thirty?......
Would like to go and personally congratulate the bloke, or gal (more likely) for such useful insight…..As someone who’s just recently turned the corner (so to speak), I can fully appreciate why the first thirty years of your life merely prep you and groom you to be what you become at thirty. I mean, in your twenties, you’re just running in the general direction of everybody else, you don’t really have any views that are truly your own and you worry about pleasing people! All this dissolves miraculously as you metamorphose into this suave, collected and self sufficient individual who can handle not only her life but also delve into other’s.
Ha……life though is not so simple. It does have a curious way of throwing things your way to make sure you’re fully occupied at all times…..So, your troubles don’t end at thirty, mate. They only change colour. There’s plenty of excitement around, new issues and more to juggle. Way to go……